Best not to go down that road lest we be seen as conspiracy nuts. Anyway, such a wide-ranging conspiracy would be nearly impossible to pull off, and could not be kept secret. The simplest explanation is that mass shootings happen (for whatever reasons) and then are quickly exploited by the anti-gunners.
Exactly, precisely so.
This is a large country, with 323,100,000+ people living in it. That's a number we have trouble actually picturing in our minds, but when you collect that many of something together, very, VERY odd and coincidental things will happen, though in very small numbers.
Think of it this way: the bigger the number of people you have, the closer you get to seeing every possible thing that COULD happen, happen at least once, to/by somebody in that group.
Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity -- and mental illness, extreme political/social/racial views, and all sorts of other human goofiness. That stuff will cause very strange events, in very small numbers, any time you've got a hundreds-of-millions sample size to look at.
The biggest problem with conspiracy theories, as AlexanderA points out, is that they require large-scale coordinated and incredibly secret, incredibly high-stakes, and incredibly sociopathic efforts by very large groups (thousands, at least) of government and non-government personnel all working in perfect harmony and without any qualm or hesitation or second-guessing or whistle-blowing. That makes for great and compelling X-Files story arcs, but doesn't actually work in real life. Sure, you may find one, ten, a dozen, or even more agents of some secret government program perfectly willing to murder lots of innocent men, women, and even children, very publicly, to make political hay. But not the hundreds of federal, state, and local officers, officials, EMS personnel, doctors, press, business owners, witnesses, etc. who'd have to be in on it to make it happen and keep the conspiracy COMPLETELY silent. And not without seeing the small flurry of secondary "coincidental" deaths there would have to be to silence the dozens or hundreds who would refuse to play along.
Then, on top of that, it would have to be WORTH something. Massive, hugely expensive, incredibly high-risk conspiracy shadow agencies would not burn themselves up on something so questionable and pointless as mass murder to promote gun control. There's no money in it. There's precious little
control in it. And, most tellingly, going all the way back to Sandy Hook -- there's no SUCCESS in it. It hasn't worked. The anti-gun side of the aisle has sputtered and spun in their own dust and gotten nowhere, and these recent killings have pushed even less gun control progress (far less, in fact) than the efforts after Sandy Hook.
If there WERE such effective conspiracy agencies in the country, ineffectual feints at promoting gun control wouldn't be important enough for them to expend their energies, agents, and opportunities on.
So, nope. Not going to go with conspiracy theories.
