Armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle and at least three handguns, a man shouting anti-Semitic slurs opened fire inside a Pittsburgh synagogue Saturday morning, killing at least 11 congregants and wounding four police officers and two others. … [This was reportedly the deadliest attack on Jews in US history.]
Critics of President Trump have argued that he is partly to blame for recent acts of violence because he has been stirring the pot of nationalism.
(The New York Times, October 27, 2018)
I hasten to reiterate this admonition to all media, which simply cannot be overstated:
I don’t know why the media always reward these psychotic people by giving them the fame they covet; that is, by plastering their pathetic mugs all over television and on the front page of every major newspaper … worldwide, and reporting pop psychology about why and how they did their dastardly deeds. Isn’t it clear to see, especially in this age of instant celebrity, why some loser would find this route to infamy irresistible?
(“Massacre in Omaha,” The iPINIONS Journal, December 7, 2007)
I simply cannot overstate that broadcasting everything about these shooters does nothing to stop more shootings. In fact, providing wall-to-wall coverage only incentivizes the next loser to plot his day of infamy.
Yet media outlets provide it every time — complete with interviews that seem more about providing folks their 15 minutes of fame than getting any useful information. But that’s only because they know they’re catering to some perverse interest far too many people have in their wallowing coverage.
So please, when these shootings occur, take two minutes to learn the facts, and then turn your TV to a channel on arts, gardening, sports, or something else. Because only low ratings will compel the media to cover these mass shootings more responsibly.
That said, media coverage is surpassed in its thoughtlessness only by people flooding social media with trite and often self-centered offers of condolences. Nothing damns this age of narcissism quite like people making the condolences they offer all about themselves.
Far worse, though, is having NRA-supporting politicians join this virtual procession of sympathizers. Because their condolences only add insult to grief. After all, if they (notably President Trump and Republicans) had any real sympathy for victims of gun violence, they would ban all assault weapons.
Instead, they would have you believe what NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said one week after the Newtown mass shooting, which left 26 dead, including 20 children:
The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.
(CBS-DC, December 21, 2012)
Of course, that’s just the mantra the NRA propagates to brainwash people into buying more guns. I have decried this in many commentaries, including “‘Under the Gun’ Appeals to Common Sense of NRA Members. Good Luck with That…” May 16, 2016, and “Target Las Vegas: Another Mass Shooting in Gun-Crazy USA.” October 2, 2017. But, trust me, no armed guard can stop a psycho hell-bent on perpetrating a mass shooting, especially if that psycho is using an assault weapon with a high-capacity magazine.
On the other hand, there’s no denying that many lives would be saved if a would-be shooter has easy access only to single-shot rifles (e.g., for hunting) and hand guns with low-capacity magazines. For example, if today’s shooter had only a hand gun instead of an assault weapon, he might have killed 4 but certainly not 11 (or more). Not to mention that he would not have been able to pin down responding officers (with their own big guns), even wounding four of them.
Meanwhile, this shooting is eerily similar to the one another white racist perpetrated in 2015 at the Emanuel African Methodist Church in South Carolina – complete with similar registering of condemnation, outpouring of sympathy, and holding of kumbaya vigils. But that showed that not even a racially motivated massacre, which killed nine people who were worshiping God, could imbue these politicians with enough moral compunction and political courage to defy the NRA.
Fuse all of that with the rhetorical license no less a person than President Trump is giving to neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and other hate-filled psychos, and you have the tinderbox that is the United States of America today. It is no accident that an unprecedented spike in hate speech, hate crimes, and general racist tomfoolery has attended his presidency.
This has included whites calling the cops on blacks for doing all kinds of ordinary, legal things … like sitting by the pool in their own apartment complex. But things like that pale into insignificance when compared with increasing incidents like another white racist targeting and killing two black people in a Kroger grocery store in Kentucky on Wednesday. This, after he tried to emulate that South Carolina shooter by targeting a black church nearby. But, by an act of God, its parishioners were locked safely inside.
The point is that, between coverage of this synagogue shooting and the mail-bombing terror that dominated coverage for days before it, the media were too preoccupied to dedicate much coverage to the Kroger shooting.
Think about that … as most of us wait like sitting ducks for the next one. I say “most of us” because it’s only a matter of time before some blacks and Jews begin doing to white sitting ducks what some whites have been doing to us for too long.
NOTE: I am stupefied by the many young Americans who say they have nothing to vote for in the midterm elections now underway. For, at the very least, they should know that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun (from shooting up schools, churches, and other places) is to vote against Republicans — whose pro-NRA policies would put that gun in his hand. #VoteDemocrats!
ENDNOTE: I have written many commentaries damning the media for exploiting everything from political gaffes to tragic events for ratings, including most frustratingly “Hey Media, Wikileaker Assange Is Still a Self-Promoting, Bail-Jumping Rape Suspect!” August 29, 2016. But nothing incites my indignation quite like the trick of news anchors bemoaning the coarsening of public debate while reporting ad nauseam on the treat of Trump’s brazen lies, juvenile insults, and lunatic conspiracies.
They are throwing this into stark relief in these last days of campaigning; most notably, by giving ten times more coverage to his scaremongering lies than to Barack Obama’s inspiring truths.
Related commentaries:
Newtown…
Under the gun…
Vegas, Gun-crazy USA…
serial mail bomber….
Wikileaker Assange…
* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Saturday, at 5:26 p.m.