When is a mass shooting not a mass shooting? When it does not fit the narrative.
When I was growing up in the south, guns were very common. This may come as a shock to those that did not “grow up in the sticks” with a bunch of “good ole boys” for neighbors and friends… but we actually went to school, WITH RIFLES AND GUNS IN OUR VEHICLES!
THE HORROR!
I went to a pretty large high school. And it was right next to another school, that had grade school kids. A few thousand kids between these two campuses. We were allowed to drive to school, and had a huge parking lot for everyone. Including the staff, there were hundreds and hundreds of vehicles in the multiple parking lots.
Among those vehicles, were hundreds of pickup trucks. And of those trucks, dozens and dozens that had rifle racks in their back windows, with a wide assortment of rifles occupying the racks. Owned by “kids”. We of course were under-18’s.
As we all queued up to leave every day, you were typically within a few car lengths of someone with a gun, on a school campus! Often the vehicle right in front of you had what people now would consider an “arsenal” of guns openly displayed.
And nobody lost their minds. Or even cared. The police were not called, SWAT was not mobilized. It was just a way of life that was common there.
Never once in all the years I went to school there, was anyone shot. Never was a rifle or handgun pulled on someone in anger. Did we have fights? Oh, yes. You are not going to have a bunch of kids with raging hormones in close proximity to each other, without a boil-over. Nevertheless, not a single fight occurred where a weapon was brandished, drawn, or fired.
My town was not that large and crime was not bad. Rarely was someone murdered. And when a murder did occur, it wasn’t “random”. The assailant and the victim knew each other. We never had a serial killer, and a ‘mass murder’ was as rare as hen’s teeth.
Back then, that is what it was called. Mass murder. There were mass murders in the largest cities in the state I lived in. However, those crimes were far away. Hundreds of miles away. And when they occurred, once again, they were not “random”. They also did not affect our little community.
ADW’s (Assault with a deadly weapon) were rare as well. Succinctly, those were Battery, resulting in harmful or offensive contact with another individual. If several people were victims of a crime, and hurt as a result, it was called in the paper, “multiple assaults”. It did not matter if the weapon was a stick, a knife or a gun. It was “multiple assaults occurred”. And it was even rare for it to be reported that way in the paper. “A fight broke out at a local nightclub and several people were hurt. The assailant used a knife and 3 people received lacerations”. That is what you would read in the paper. That was in the big cities once again. Nothing like that happened in my town.
The recent news got me thinking about the idyllic life that I lived for a couple decades in that small town. Why did I leave there? And what the heck happened to this country?
Most of all… when did “Mass Shootings” start happening? I definitely do not remember reading about them in the local newspapers.
That piqued my curiosity. So I did some searches. I avoided Google like the plague, since we know Google does funny stuff with search results nowadays. And I’m not really sold on DuckDuckGo. I have a good bit of knowledge of search engines, having worked for Google, and I know a search engine is only as good as the database that is at its core. DDG is still in its infancy, and the depth of its database is still shallow, when it comes to historical information.
So, I went straight to the source. Newspaper’s online archives.
Except for one article from 2001, and one from 1952, it appears 2013 is the year that Mainstream Media gave birth to the term, “Mass Shooter”. Before then, it was just a “shooting spree”, or “Mass murder” if people ended up dead.
This REALLY got my interest up. What happened in 2013, to give rise to this novel term, for something that has been happening since we have been walking on two feet, and gained the use of our thumbs?
Then I found it…
Ahh, I see now. A brand new non-profit needed a way to justify its existence. And the mainstream news, suffering from cord cutting and newspaper banishing, granted the GVA their golden fleece. A fleece, indeed. And “Mass shooting” was born!
The lamestream media is its own biggest enemy. There is always news out there. News occurs every second of every day. Therefore, the MSM has a choice. Report all the news, and make its readers numb to the news… or report only a portion of the news.
Ahh, but what portion should they report on? Good, positive news, with nice outcomes, where everyone is happy at the end? Or the horror filled, terrible, people dying every second news?
Large websites are expensive to run. Large news companies have staff that want to be paid. News sites need advertisers to pay the bills, and to pay the executives charged with running these “news agencies”. Those yachts don’t buy themselves! And the only way to get advertisers, is to present them with a metric that says, “your ad will be viewed”. The metric is clicks. Clicks can be loosely translated to views and time spent on the site. With this loose metric, the MSM can “promise” advertisers, your ad will be viewed by XX amount of eyeballs for YY amount of minutes.
Nothing gets clicks like fear. And the MSM has become adept fear peddlers. If you believed everything that the news sites tell you… you are about to die any second. From any of a few dozens of ways. And if you personally aren’t going to die from a Mass Shooter, the world is going to blow up in a ball of flames from Global Climate Warming Change, any year now.
Once again, news happens, all the time. Even bad news, occurs pretty much consistently. If the MSM were to continuously tell you of all the bad news constantly, people would get numb to it. Nobody would care anymore. Nobody would click on it.
So how do you keep news of people dying all the time, fresh and fearful? You introduce a boogeyman. But suddenly a conundrum occurs. You do not want to inundate people with bad news constantly, but you need to keep the spectre of fear in their minds constantly. That means the perpetrators of these heinous crimes cannot be such a limited populous, that people rarely interact with them. Where is the FEAR IN THAT?
What to do, what to do. A light bulb flickers on. BLAME EVERYTHING BAD THAT HAPPENS, ON WHITE MALES!
They are a large populace. You can’t leave your home and not encounter a white male. You probably have one living down the road from you, or even next door. Heck, you probably even WORK with some White Males. Ahh, NOW the FEAR IS FLOWING! There are White Males EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK! Any one of them could be the next Mass Shooter!
That’s how you, the average American Citizen gets played by the #fakenews establishment and the Gun Violence Archive.
While the majority of gun related assaults are occurring in “gun free zones”, and “Democratic governed areas”, and while the majority of gun crimes occur primarily with the demographic, blacks and Hispanics, and while the majority of shootings are related to other crimes and gang violence, you are presented with Conservative White Males randomly shooting up places, as the boogeyman.
Currently, a mass shooting is loosely and inconsistently defined as 4 or more people as victims, NOT including the assailant, injured in a gun related crime. Let that sink in for a moment.
Now let me give you an example. Let’s say 2 of a City’s Finest inhabitants meet with a third person to acquire some drugs in the local ghetto. The buyers foolishly whip out a stack of bills, and the drug dealer, realizes that if he grabs that stack, he will make more that night, than he could, selling product to a half dozen people, and he can go home for the night, with a bunch of cash and still have his drugs to sell tomorrow.
He pulls his cheap pistol out, and pistol whips the person holding the stack of cash and his friend. He grabs the cash and starts running. The friend of the person that just was robbed had the foresight to bring his own gun. By the time his vision clears, the now robber, former dealer, is a good 20 yards away at this point, and the victim’s friend, let’s a round loose in his direction. The robber gets lucky, but is winged in the arm. A grazer, but a heavily bleeding cut is on his upper arm. He tears around the corner and knocks an old woman down who breaks her hip.
The robber ends up in the hospital. The old woman calls for help and gets an ambulance. The two people report being robbed at gunpoint and neglect to mention the drug deal gone bad. The cop notes that they are both bleeding from lacerations to the forehead. The cops track down the robber in the hospital, and also are told of the old woman that was admitted, who describes the perp as the one that knocked her down.
And there you have it, a random Mass Shooting. And you’re like, WHAT? One person got shot!!! Not only that, guess how many White Males were involved in that “Mass Shooting”?
Similar crimes occur constantly. That is how the GVA and MSM conspire to present you with an ever increasing statistic. By lowering the amount of people involved to qualify, while at the same time, including ancillary injuries to the crime, while including crimes where most of the people involved knew each other in one way or another. They peddle “Mass shootings” as random, while including directed crime in the statistic. And then blame it on a statistically larger group, than the actual small group that commits most of the crimes.
The weekend after the terrible shootings in El Paso and Dayton, 6 people were shot at a party in Chicago, not by a white male. MSM barely reported it. It’s not in the news cycle anymore.
Wednesday, 6 police officers were shot when police attempted to serve a narcotics warrant on a row house in Philadelphia. Not by a white male. Not with a legal gun. The assailant, was not legally allowed to own a firearm. Gun control now!
The crime will be memory holed by next week, while everyone will still be talking about the need for Gun Control, the need to take “fully-semiautomatic Assault Weapons” (a made up term to stoke fear) off the streets. The MSM will still talk about the need for Red Flag laws, and El Paso and to a lesser extent, Dayton, because he was a known leftist.
16-17% of the populace in the United States, commit over 50% of the violent crimes. The majority involve firearms. Typically handguns. Many are revolvers (non-semiautomatic weapons). Few are legal. Almost all occur in Democrat run cities. If you do not live near one of these crime ridden cities, do not participate in gang culture, are not out committing crimes, and your local demographics are below the national average, you have very little to worry about.
Yet, the MSM media wants you to be in constant fear. Because Fear Sells. They want you to believe that law abiding Conservative/Republican White Males, possessing legal semi-automatic rifles, are what everyone should fear.
You should be in constant fear, everywhere you go of the White Male. School, festivals, grocery shopping, enjoying a night out. [Gilroy, a festival. El Paso, a grocery store, Dayton, a nightclub] Convenient locations to push a narrative and conjure up fear. Conveniently, white males are the perpetrators. These stories stay in the news for weeks, while places like Chicago where dozens of people get shot up each weekend, gets one news story.
The sad fact is, crime occurs because of bad mental health. The lack of mental health help available, exacerbates the problem. Without addressing mental problems, nothing will change. Guns don’t kill and injure people, mentally ill people do. If you take away guns, they will use knives. Just look at Great Britain.
Instead of putting money toward helping people’s mental health, the focus and money is on destroying the god-given right to own guns. With nearly 130 Million gun owners in the United States, if guns were the problem, there would be hundreds of times more shootings occurring. But there’s not. Gun control is pushed, to disarm a populace, allowing the government to become ever more tyrannical. That is specifically what the 2nd Amendment was created to prevent. Historically, nearly every nation that was disarmed, was thrown into chaos and their people reduced to poverty within a decade, by an out of control, corrupt government.
How many “Mass Shootings” have occurred this year? I couldn’t tell you. Because the reporting is inaccurate, incomplete, and if it does not fit a narrative, it is not reported and followed-up on by the Mainstream Media.
The non-profit that created this term? Well they are suspect and complicit in their data collection. Nobody likes a downward trend when trying to stoke fear into the masses (see Global Climate Warming Change numbers). And like GCWC, if your business and paycheck depends on statistics and the fear associated with it, it always has to be more, higher!
The true statistics reporting timeframe typically lags an entire year or more with the most “trusted” source, the FBI, so I might be able to tell you next year, or the following year, how many occurred this year. But I can’t tell you right now.
Until then just remember, you have a 1 in a million chance of being involved in a mass shooting. And if this is your main worry in life, don’t drive a car, go outside during a thunderstorm, or swim in the ocean, because each of those activities are thousands of times more likely to kill you, than a “Mass Shooter”.
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