A couple days ago I wondered – somewhat sarcastically – if the coverage of the Dayton and El Paso mass shootings would be covered differently in the press. And a few days have passed and it is clear that there is a *massive* discontinuity. In El Paso, the shooters politics are front and center; anyone who shares *any* of his political beliefs is by extension a monster. And in Dayton, the shooters politics are covered sparingly, if at all, and I’m sure as hell not seeing a lot of attempts to claim that anyone sharing his politics is culpable.
One might argue that since the El Paso shooter killed 22 and the Dayton shooter killed 9, the Dayton shooter was a “lesser” villain. But the El Paso shooter was *done* at 22; he’d left the scene. The Dayton shooter was shot dead by the cops inside of thirty seconds. he was still busy killing, and had much killing left to do. The last I heard (this could now be inaccurate), he’d fired more than 40 rounds; thus, roughly one death per four shots. But he had 250 rounds of ammo left. Left to himself, his initial kill ratio means that he could have killed anther 250/4 people… more than sixty further deaths. Simple math attributes around seventy total dead to the Dayton shooter, more than three times the El Paso total. Of course such things cannot be considered truly valid, but it does indicate that the Dayton killer was no less evil than the El Paso killer. So why is that incident, and the politics of the man behind it, seemignly of no interest to the press?
There’s a reason.
- He was a self-avowed leftist.
- He was a Socialist.
- He supported Breadline Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
- He was opposed to the 2nd Amendment, and in favor of gun control (shades of Dorner).
- He supported the domestic terrorists in Antifa.
- He hated Trump & ICE.
Obviously – at least to people whose brains have not been consumed by and twisted up with hateful ideologies – the fact that the Dayton killer was a leftist does not excuse the El Paso killer. They’re both monsters. But it is pretty clear that the fact that the Dayton killer was a leftist is being downplayed to downright ignored by much of the media. If Bernie or Warren were to show up in Dayton, would there b the outrage that Trump is getting for going to El Paso? trump is catching hell for referring to the invasion of central Americans as an “invasion,” with claims that his choice of words is responsible for hate crimes. Is AOC going to be held to the same standard for going on about “concentration camps?” Is the collective guilt by association being heaped upon the right going to be heaped upon the left?