Unlike many, I'm also horrified at the shocking number of murders every weekend in many of our cities. Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore suffer dozens of murders every week. Mostly, they're ignored by the media.
Yesterday, a friend of mine posted on her social media account this question: Why do we hear so much in the media about each mass shooting, but the daily murders in our inner cities are virtually ignored? She then said she didn't want the comments to turn into a political debate.
I commented that if she didn't want a political debate, then her question couldn't be answered. Because the answer to her specific question -- why so much media coverage for mass shootings and not for daily murders -- is a political answer.
The answer to the problem of why people are shooting each other is, sadly, is much deeper.
First, from a strictly journalistic standpoint, Mass Shootings aren't normal. They're OUT of the normal. That's one reason why the media covers them. Events that are abnormal are inherently newsworthy. That's why you'll see the house on fire in your neighborhood on the news, but you won't see your neighbor mowing his grass on the news.
Mass Shootings, though seemingly on the rise in the last few decades, are still extremely rare. And thus newsworthy. Murders every night in Chicago, on the other hand, are very common. Baltimore alone is on pace to have a homicide virtually every night of the year. Chicago, twice that. The local news might give it mention, but nothing more.
The real answer, however, is political. Or maybe, more to the point, agenda-driven. Today's mainstream media outlets, be it broadcast, print, or internet, are liberally run. They lean left, and in most cases, have given up all pretense of being unbiased. If you believe otherwise, you're simply ignoring reality. They are driven by advertising revenue, and little else. They don't care as much about disseminating information as they do selling papers.
Now, the same thing can be said about Conservative run news outlets as well. But there's a distinct difference, and a reason why, say, Fox News, stands pretty much alone on the Conservative right, but the Liberal Left has CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, et al, most major newspapers, and run Google and Facebook. And the reason is fairly simple: Liberalism ideology doesn't allow for free thinking. Liberalism at its core promotes the idea that most people cannot think for themselves, and therefore are not smart enough to make the best decisions for themselves. They have to be told what to believe, and how to behave, and how to spend their money, and what insurance they should have, etc. Liberalism teaches that nobody is better than anybody else, and therefore, no one deserves to be more successful than anyone else, regardless of how hard anyone works.
In short, Liberalism believes that the government should be in charge of virtually everything, and make all decisions for everybody, because it can do it more wisely and fairly than the individual. And many who get involved in media -- reasons for which we do not have the time to discuss here -- tend to adhere to that belief. As such, most media outlets are Liberal, and their belief is that it is their job to tell people what to believe. Most consumers of mainstream media are fine with that assessment and sadly are quite content to be told what to believe. So liberalism sells to the masses much more than conservatism. While there are far more Conservatives in this country than Liberals, there are far more Liberals who are willing to allow themselves to be told what to think, and so they consume the mass media much more than do Conservatives. CNN is liberal only because that is the audience they can most easily sway. It's simply economics.
Mass shootings are rare, and thus very compartmentalized, and as such are very easy to attach to an agenda talking point. These days, they're very easy to attach to the political rhetoric of their choice, even though mass shootings have been taking place for decades now. And in the case of the mainstream media, they're going to attach it to Donald Trump, even though he is not in any way, shape, or form, the problem. But that's their agenda. Trump is a racist and a bigot, everything he says is racist and inflammatory, even if its true, and so the mass shooters are just following Trump's creed. It's stupid, of course, but easy.
The murders happening in our cities every night are far more difficult to deal with, because, in general, they fly in the face of every Liberal talking point:
- They're not committed with assault style weapons, but rather primarily with handguns, so gun-control is off the table.
- The city of Chicago, for one, has some of the toughest gun-law restrictions anywhere, and yet have massively-high gun crime, so the argument for tougher gun laws is off the table.
- Most of the crime happens in the inner city, and the "less affluent" parts of town, so the idea that citizens who are helped by government welfare are somehow better off is off the table.
- The vast majority of the crime involves inter-racial combatants, i.e., black-on-black crime, so the white supremacy assertions are off the table.
- Turns out, cities like Baltimore really are cesspools of crime and poverty, just like Trump said, so calling Trump a bigot is off the table (even though they still do.)
That does not fit the Liberal agenda, so the media doesn't cover it.
So the Left focuses on the Mass Shootings. And does everything they can do to monopolize each event so they can push an agenda.
And that's the problem. Everybody gets so bogged down in placing blame -- when the blame lies squarely and solely with the shooters themselves -- that nothing gets done to fix the problem.
The overall agenda, of course, at this point, is to blame Donald Trump for everything. Which is blatantly absurd. Mass Shootings over the past, say, 40 years, have happened at about the same rate under all different administrations. Even a small cursory search of mass shootings will show that while the US leads the world in TOTAL # of mass shooting events, the top 5 criminal mass shootings in history didn't even happen in the United States, and only 2 of the Top 10 occurred in the US.
- Kent State happened under Nixon's administration.
- San Ysidro McDonalds happened under Reagan.
- Columbine happened under Clinton.
- Virginia Tech happened under Bush, Jr.
- Sandy Hook the Washington Navy Yard happened under Obama.
This past weekends shootings are an excellent example: The El Paso shooting was committed by an apparent white supremacist, and the Dayton shooting by a Democrat Liberal fond of Elizabeth Warren. In both cases, the shooters are appear to be certifiably nuts.
ALL shootings are acts of terrorism. Whether by a white supremacist or a radical muslim. But even then, those are just words. Obama's refusal to call terrorist acts by Muslims "terrorism" didn't make it any less terrorism. And even though Trump has repeatedly denounced racism and white nationalism, there are still racists of all colors in this country who want to do bad things to good people.
Gun control isn't the answer. Never has been, and it isn't the problem anyway. Our country has more gun-control legislation on the books right now than it ever has in its history, and yet these events continue to happen. Cities like Chicago prove that more gun laws don't cut down on crime all that much, if any. And most mass shootings happen in gun-free zones anyway. It doesn't get any more gun-controlled than that. Wal-Mart is a gun-free business, and yet a man took a gun into one in El Paso and killed 22 people. Nobody in the store had any chance to defend themselves.
Meanwhile, armed police reacted to the shooting in Dayton in less than a minute and stopped the killing spree at 9. By their own admission, the gunman was trying to get into a night club (a gun-free club) and had he done so before officers shot him dead, the death toll would have been "catastrophic" -- their words, not mine.
Some would say we don't have "enough" gun control. I would counter that we're not enforcing the laws already in place very well, so the need for more is moot. And it is true that the US leads the world in number of mass shootings. But we are the only country that allows our citizens to freely carry guns. And there is a very specific reason for that. It is a reason on which the country was founded: To resist oppression by the government. As such, we enjoy more freedoms in this country than any country in the world because our Constitution allows for it's people to resist. Every other country in the world envies this about us. And the freedoms we enjoy because of it are one of the reasons hundreds of thousands of people from other countries try to enter our country every year.
We have more guns on the street than any other country, and we feature more gun crime than any other country. But the trade off is that we offer more freedom than any other country, and the primary reason for that is because was can resist our government's oppression that would otherwise take it away.
Layer 2 of the gun-control debate is that we should ban assault weapons. Which is also stupid because the human race has proven time and again that it will kill no matter what the weapon. Besides, there are literally thousands -- maybe hundreds of thousands -- of assault-style weapons in the hands of private citizens at this moment that have never harmed a soul. The actions of a few lunatics cannot be reason to take those lawfully-obtained weapons away from law-abiding citizens.
Liberals argue that automatic weaponry allows killers to kill more people in one swing than does a simple handgun, and that our forefathers only knew of muskets and could not fathom assault-style weapons when they penned the Constitution. Each of those assertions may be true, but the Constitution wasn't written for a specific gun, rather, a specific concept. Gun ownership was a means of resisting government oppression (and providing for and protecting one's family.) It doesn't change the fact that a Boeing airliner in the right hands can have a vastly advantageous impact on society, but in the wrong hands can kill 3000 innocent people in one dastardly act. Nobody -- except for that dingbat AOC -- is calling to ban jet airliners.
Besides, I would be more than willing to discuss restrictions on certain types of weapons when the Left can promise me they won't go after all guns in general. If I've learned anything about Liberals in my lifetime, it's that enough is never enough. They scream about AR-15's today, and I guarantee you, if they succeed in getting them banned, they'll be screaming about hunting rifles tomorrow and handguns the day after that. I absolutely refuse to discuss ANY banning of guns until the Left can assure me there is a limit to what they want banned. That, of course, will never happen.
I created a Facebook post yesterday that read, "Blaming Donald Trump for everything racially and politically wrong with this country is like trying to blame the "Stranger Things" [child actors] for all the corruption in Hollywood." It's absurd to think any of this is Donald Trump's fault. He literally has only been on the scene for three years. There are those who want to believe he's not doing much to make things better, or even making it worse. Fine. I won't argue that here. But clearly this is a problem that has been festering in this country for decades, only getting worse with time. Trump may or may not prove to be the answer, but he certainly is not the problem.
The problem is simple if we'd just take the time to look at it logically. And, if the Left had the courage to admit that their ideology is not only flawed, but damaging to the psychology of the country. Ever since the country began edging away from it's Christian foundations -- which, if we're being truthful, really ramped up beginning in the 1960's -- we have seen an overall moral decline in the country that has coincided with a rise in tragic events like mass shootings.
We have demonized everything from prayer in schools to traditional marriage. We've championed the murder of babies, legalized it even, and told our children it is OK to question God when it comes to how he created them. Christians themselves rave about how we should all be more "loving" and yet buy their children video games for Christmas that promote mass killing as entertainment. We've elevated the importance of sporting contests over Sunday church services. Leftists have been telling us for decades now how awful we are to our planet, and that it's all going to come to an end soon. I mean, what's a few dead people in a Wal-Mart if the Earth is going to be uninhabitable in a few years anyway?
Leftists have spent the last 30 years telling us how bad white people are, especially white men. And then they wonder why a white man goes nuts and shoots up a church full of black people.
Democrat liberal policy creates and promotes a permanent underclass. Look at every Liberal-run city in this country and then try to convince me that Liberal policy is actually beneficial. It creates and maintains a class of people permanently subsistent on the government, who are then told that all their problems are the fault of big, bad, white Republicans. And being convinced that the American dream cannot possibly include them, they resort to crime to deal with their poverty.
We've told our young girls they can accomplish anything men can accomplish and then allow mentally-deranged men enter their ranks and destroy their ideas of womanhood. We tell our Sons its wrong to be and act like men. That masculinity is "toxic" (whatever that means). And we've devalued the role of the father in the family. Single motherhood is championed over toxic fatherhood and boys grow up without fathers at an alarming rate. This article shows that a vast majority of mass shooters since Columbine have grown up in broken homes, many without fathers.
Men can't be men, and women can't be women, and then we wonder why they're so confused about life and can't get it all together before they go shoot up their schools.
We don't have a gun problem. If we did, then all these Mass Shootings would look the same. But they don't. We have a morals problem. And it's getting worse. And it lies squarely on the declining moral climate in this country over the past few decades -- a declination that is advanced by Liberal ideology.
God is wrong, mean, or doesn't exist at all. Traditional family values are worthless. All white people are bad, and have an unfair advantage in life. Anything you earn and work hard for should be absconded and given to others. Personal responsibility is pointless. The Earth is going to cease to exist in a matter of a few years, and it's all our fault. Being a woman or a man is meaningless. Lawlessness is a preferred method of dealing with society, and police officers are horrible people who would rather see you dead than protect you. Following the laws of the United States is racist. Killing babies is OK. And you're too dumb to think for yourselves.
And we wonder why people go nuts and shoot a bunch of people.
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