One has to be genuinely stupid to deny Sandy Hook. But lots of Americans are stupid as our literacy rates demonstrate and the current moron in the white house demonstrates too. But conspiracy idiots are a special blend of dumb, they deny the obvious which is quite a leap. Their minds cannot accept the world as it is and like people who think they are being followed or monitored they live in a closed strange place. A few pieces below may help? May.
"I want to argue for something which is controversial, although I believe that it is also intuitive and commonsensical. My claim is this: Oliver
believes what he does because that is the kind of thinker he is or, to put it more bluntly, because there is something wrong with how he thinks. The problem with conspiracy theorists is not, as the US legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues, that they have little relevant information. The key to what they end up believing is how they interpret and respond to the vast quantities of relevant information at their disposal. I want to suggest that this is fundamentally a question of the way they are. Oliver isn’t mad (or at least, he needn’t be). Nevertheless, his beliefs about 9/11 [or liberal schemes] are the result of the peculiarities of his intellectual constitution – in a word, of his intellectual character."
The intellectual character of conspiracy theorists | Aeon Essays
"But when we consider the beliefs of other people?
It's an epistemic shit show out there. Astrology, conspiracies, the healing power of crystals. Aliens who abduct Earthlings and build pyramids. That vaccines cause autism or that Obama is a crypto-Muslim — or that the world was formed some 6,000 years ago, replete with fossils made to look millions of years old. How could anyone believe this stuff?! ... No, seriously: how?"
Crony Beliefs | Melting Asphalt
"Some of the ones that I focus on in my own research include aspects of causal reasoning, which relates to explanation, but also diverges from it in various cases; also, aspects of moral reasoning.
Why do we have the particular moral beliefs that we do? How do we evaluate when someone is blameworthy and when they should be punished? You also see this in many other cases: aspects of language, aspects of how we think about other people's minds, aspects of how we think about social structure. These are all topics that we benefit from the insights of both philosophy and psychology." Tania Lombrozo
Learning By Thinking | Edge.org
....maybe the kid had magic bullets?
