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A deranged gunman opened fire through stained glass windows at the Minneapolis Annunciation Catholic School this week, killing two children aged 8 and 10, and wounding 17 others, mostly children.
There is an unbreakable rule in the modern media coverage of mass shootings: If the perpetrator’s motivations are even tenuously tied to right-wing ideology, coverage will focus on the dangers of rhetoric coming from Republicans.
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If not, or if the shooter’s ideology can be linked to the left wing, the conversation will focus on the lack of gun control, a problem that’s also the fault of Republicans.
And a person watching CNN or scrolling through legacy media headlines might not have been aware that the shooter was a radicalized left-wing man who identified as transgender. The New York Times’s headline reads “Minneapolis Suspect Knew Her Target, but Motive Is a Mystery.”
While the adjective “Orwellian” has been battered into a cliche, I’m not sure there’s a better recent illustration.
The first charge of journalism is conveying facts. Context, debates, and opinions follow. The shooter was a mentally unhinged biological male who identified as a woman and embraced a host of violent political slogans and imagery. Since transgenderism has weirdly evolved into a dogma among modern progressive Democrats, the media are reluctant to discuss it. Trying to hide these things undermines any effort to grapple with the event.
Other outlets also ignored their editorial policy of referring to those identified as “she” with their preferred pronoun. Even Fox News initially used “their” to describe the shooter rather than his preferred pronoun. One supposes that the Left gets to pick who is truly transgender depending on whether their actions reflect poorly on a group.
There’s been a rash of political violence attached to extremist trans groups — ignored by most outlets. That doesn’t mean every transgender American has a propensity toward violence. It is, however, completely legitimate to wonder what effect “gender affirming” drugs and methods have on confused young people.
Many in the legacy media were also allegedly flummoxed by the motivations of a person who targeted Catholic schoolchildren, wrote “Kill Donald Trump” on his gun, didn’t believe “6 million was enough,” and wanted to “Free Palestine.” One doesn’t really have to theorize much about the general contours of this ideology. The shooter might well have harbored personal grievances against the school, and mass murderers rarely possess a neatly coherent worldview, but this one strongly gravitated toward anti-Western ideas that are fashionable among a lot of young people on the progressive Left.
Rather than deal with reality, the media keep it opaque. The reason for all this is politics.
Partisan tunnel vision requires Democrats to ignore any factor in a shooting other than the guns. And they will use the tragedies to figure out ways to make it more difficult for law-abiding people to defend themselves.
Perhaps the biggest myth the coverage of mass shootings has created is that Republicans are standing in the way of solving the problem. It’s highly debatable, to be charitable, that Democrats have ever proposed a bill or even an idea that would do much to deter, much less stop, these gruesome events. Indeed, you can argue that many of their policies make them more likely.
Gun-free zones, for instance, are batting a solid .000 in deterring shootings. The Annunciation Church shooter noted that the church was a soft target. The mayor of Minneapolis wants to ban “assault” rifles. Well, somewhere around 80% of mass shooters use handguns. You could expand waiting times for months, but killers would wait. You could raise the age of buying a gun to 21, but most mass shooters are over that age. And “universal background checks,” which, for all intents and purposes, already exist, are useless when shooters break a slew of existing laws. Then again, most high-profile mass shooters obtain guns legally because they rarely have criminal records.
Minnesota already has many restrictions that national Democrats contend would curb mass shootings. There are limitations on “assault” weapon sales, a 30-day waiting period for the purchase of guns, ammunition sales restrictions, the ability to sign extreme risk protection orders, and “universal” background checks. Do-somethingism is meant to move forward with an agenda that has little to do with mass shootings.
And yet, in many, if not most, of these cases, the shooters are on someone’s radar because they have talked about harming others or written insane manifestos. These incidents are almost exclusively perpetrated by young men who have exhibited serious anti-social behavior. In a study of mass shootings from 2008 to 2017, the Secret Service found that “100 percent of perpetrators showed concerning behaviors, and in 77 percent of incidents, at least one person — most often a peer — knew about their plan.”
There’s also obviously an element of contagion here because the Minneapolis gunman celebrated previous mass murders. One wishes that we didn’t have to politicize each of these events just moments after we hear about them. You wish the media didn’t mention the names of the gunmen, most of whom seem to be driven by the glory of seeing their names in the news posthumously. But that’s simply reality now. Gun rights activists have no reason to allow the Left to dictate the coverage.
Social media plays a role in spreading nihilistic and transgressive ideas to young people who have little foundational understanding of history or morality. But it’s also surely the case that without it, the public wouldn’t have known the full story of this shooting or others.
As horrific as these events are, it should also be noted that studies that claim school shootings have skyrocketed over the past years are highly misleading. Gun restrictionists often skew the statistics in ways that make it appear as if this is the norm. Shootings are already horrifying enough. One is too many. But the efforts to make them seem ubiquitous are also political.
A mass school shooting is not random criminality. And we need realistic, productive, and germane ideas to curb them. Instead, Democrats are using another horrific tragedy to dunk on their political opponents or mock them for praying in tragic times.
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There is no panacea. And I don’t pretend to have the answers. But it seems that there needs to be a better focus on heading off these events by intervening when young people exhibit mental illness or anti-social behavior. That’s going to take holistic effort that includes communities and a change in culture, not a bunch of new laws.
But it’s going to be difficult if we can’t agree on the facts first.