Evidently, they are so distressed that people disagree with them that almost half of Republicans feel that the only solution is to shoot everyone else.
I've posted before on the counter-intuitive and ridiculous things that people believe. It isn't entirely clear to me why such a congregation of these people is occurring in the GOP, which I remember from my childhood as a party that valued common sense and fact-based analysis.
A recent Scientific American article discussed conspiracy theories and how people could believe in them. One of the more interesting phenomena discussed in the article is how people could believe in two contradictory conspiracy theories at the same time, for example believing both that Bin Laden was dead before the "Zero Dark Thirty" raid, and also believing that the raid had failed and Bin Laden had escaped. The authors suggested that the key factor was the level of distrust that the conspiracists had for traditional authority figures.
This distrust has certainly been well-earned by politicians of all stripes, but I would think that would lead people to look at actual facts from multiple sources and to think critically about them. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case.
