Mass shootings and the media

Can we have a reasonable conversation about the problem of mass murder in our society? If we’re going to try, input from the mainstream media must be excluded from the discussion. The media solution is always “more gun control!”

However, only a fool would believe that more laws would prevent future violence. Private gun ownership is basically illegal in Chicago, and yet an astonishing number of people are nevertheless murdered by criminals and gang members using illegal firearms. According to gun control advocates, the problem is that criminals still have access to illegal weapons because gun ownership remains legal in other areas nearby.

Like Pavlov’s dogs, the media’s conditioned response to such tragedy is the inevitable call for more legislation to regulate the sale and ownership of guns. People don’t kill people, only guns kill people. However, simple logic and raw statistics argue otherwise. The problem wasn’t that these mass shooters had access to weapons, because everybody has access to something that can be used as a weapon. The problem was that his twenty victims were defenseless. If only one of the good guys had been carrying a gun as well, lives could have been saved. Frankly, if you don’t understand what the Founding Fathers were thinking about when they wrote the 2nd Amendment, all you have to do is read current headlines about the growing crisis in Hong Kong.

But what do these recent mass murderers who used guns and the Tsarnaev brothers (Boston Marathon terrorists) have in common? Not much, really– except the desire to kill. Yet the media seems intent on creating the false narrative that if only guns were banned, people wouldn’t murder each other, completely ignoring the fact that bombs, trucks, and even a machete can also be used as a weapon to terrorize and maim or kill innocent victims. The perpetrators come from different backgrounds and offer different excuses as their motives, but there are common denominators in their despicable crimes, inspired by dark emotions: anger, and hate.

And what does the media do? Remember “gun control advocate” David Hogg? How long has it been since he survived the shootings at Parkland, a year and a half?

Try this experiment: type his name into Google, and “David Hogg” should get you about 14 million hits. Next, type in the name Keanon Lowe. You’ll probably get around 67 thousand matches returned. And now you might be wondering, who is Keanon Lowe? That’s exactly my point–if you’re like me, you probably didn’t hear anything about the “event” that made him quasi-famous. My question is, why don’t you know his name?

Why doesn’t everyone? Why isn’t he as famous as David Hogg?

Because we never heard about it. The media didn’t make his story into a big deal, because nobody died. You see, Keanon Lowe is only a high school football coach and part-time security guard at his school. When Lowe went to find a certain student for disciplinary reasons, he reached the classroom only seconds before the young man entered with a shotgun. Even though he was unarmed, Lowe tackled the kid and took away the gun without a shot being fired. Sure, there was an article about his heroism in USA Today and the ESPN article several months after the fact, but Lowe saved a classroom of kids from a gunman, and from the media reaction you’d think it was no big deal.

But there is much, much more to the story. Keanon Lowe had coached in the NFL and turned down several offers to coach college football in order to stay home and make a difference in his local community. He made all the difference on May 17th, when he stopped a massacre before it started.

Gun bans won’t stop people from getting shot. It won’t stop people from hating each other and wanting to kill. Over the weekend, the media has gleefully reported that Democratic candidates for president have been blaming the president’s rhetoric for the mass shootings, completely ignoring the fact one of the shooters was an alleged liberal atheist or Satanist and the other a radical environmentalist and Elizabeth Warren supporter. Neither of these murderers could possibly be described as fans of President Trump.

A number of words might be used to describe Donald Trump, and not all of them are complimentary: Trump is rich, confident, egotistical, bold, mercurial, and quite arrogant. His supporters would argue that he’s generous, optimistic, brilliant, and also very patriotic. His detractors have claimed Trump is a racist, Nazi, traitor, and a dangerous idiot. His continued success in spite of constant opposition to his agenda from both Republicans and Democrats seems to refute the claims of Trump’s most ardent critics. The president has been called illegitimate, a racist, a white supremacist, a white nationalist, and just about every derogatory term in the book. The very same people calling for civility helped create the discord we see.

Now I personally wouldn’t dream of blaming Elizabeth Warren for the actions of a madman because I don’t think she put a gun in anybody’s hand or forced him to pull the trigger, but her rhetoric is equally as divisive and inflammatory as anything the President has said, without a doubt. However, if somebody besides the gunman is going to be blamed for the senseless slaughter of innocent people, it should be Elizabeth Warren instead of Donald Trump or the NRA, because it was her political rhetoric that helped shape his worldview. He said so.

What’s really funny is that people like Al Sharpton and Chuck Schumer don’t realize people like me were reluctant to vote for Trump because we know his real history, and remember the days when Jesse Jackson praised Trump for giving the Rainbow Coalition an office on Wall Street. While I was not a “Never Trump” person, I was definitely a “Can’t we get anyone better?”

Gun control isn’t really about guns; it’s all about control. A ban on guns won’t prevent a lunatic from throwing an innocent child from a balcony for no apparent reason. It won’t stop people from hating others for no real reason. It even won’t stop a madman like James Hodgkinson from trying to murder Republican Congressman Steve Scalise and others, while they were trying to practice for a charity baseball game. There are tens of millions of legal registered guns in America, and who knows how many more illegal weapons. Even if private gun ownership wasn’t an explicitly protected legal right according to the Constitution that would require a new amendment to overturn, it simply isn’t realistic to believe even gun confiscation would get all the guns out of the wrong hands.

Jesus said that we should love our enemies, and bless those who curse us. It’s not easy to do when your enemy is comparing you to Adolph Hitler, a man who killed six million people. The problem isn’t that radical leftists like Antifa are now buying guns. The problem is that they want to use them on their perceived enemies because in their perverse minds, certain types of violence against certain people is perfectly acceptable. The good people in society have every right and should have every opportunity to defend themselves from harm.

The real problem is that people want to kill strangers for no reason because they’ve become irrationally angry. But the media wants us to believe the problem is private gun ownership, but they really want to control the general public using the power of persuasion. The media doesn’t want us to realize that most of these crazy mass murderers are liberals.

That’s why we’ve been bombarded with stories about David Hogg, but you might have missed the story of Keanon Lowe if you just blinked twice. Good news doesn’t fit the media narrative and agenda. Don’t let yourself be led like mindless sheep. Don’t let your emotions trump (pun intended) logic and reason.

Think for yourself.