Media Promotes It
Police Play a Role
Perps All Get Gunshot
Liberals Love Cops Guns
Audiences Glued To It
Obama Using It
The thing about the San Bernardino incident isn’t the crooks.
It’s the cops.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said these people think it’s all some big game.
I know, I know, Mayor Bloomberg said that about young blacks living in ghettos, what we now tastefully call inner cities. He didn’t say it about the police. He actually said those people think, “It’s a joke to have a gun. It’s a joke to pull a trigger,” (reported by the Aspen Times from a speech the mayor gave). But he hit the nail right on the head. This is some gigantic macabre game. Time to suit up! It’s trigger time! The game is on again. And it’s not, “Stay tuned, film at six.” It’s live coverage all day long!
Look at the boys in blue parading around in all that fresh-pressed dress. And now rolling in with military combat vehicles. Local shooting, feds arrive in riot gear. What a show! But c’mon, they’re only looking for three guys.
I know, I know—you think I don’t know? These three guys are heavily armed! They’ve got AK-47s for Pete’s sake, and just murdered people willfully. It makes sense to lock down the entire city (government offices right away, then wield citywide power), bring in mini-tanks and armored personnel carriers, call in hundreds of officers in every type of battle gear they own so they can mill around on camera. More flashy lights than a fifty-car wreck on the freeway. The media has to have something to air incessantly, even if it is the same image of four cops skulking low and the rest waiting around in parking lots.
But I also know these villains had rifles. Elliot Ness (remember him?) and his feds faced real machine guns. Ness and his boys did it in suits and ties. Think about that. Closed down no streets. Faced murderers just as brazen and callous, even if those guys did pick their victims differently, with collateral damage. Dead victims everywhere.
No, it used to be possible to go after brazen wild-eyed passionate heavily armed murderers, with similar good-guy-to-bad-guy mortality rates, and not put an American city under military siege. It’s a complex game. The game has changed. It’s not good.
Our state newspaper (there’s an oxymoron if you love a free press) The Arizona Republic, Gannett’s #2 rag after USA Today, just asked gun owners what can we do about all this “gun violence”: “How would you, the responsible gun owner, stop the never-ending carnage wrought by irresponsible people who should not have access to guns?”
They’ve framed the argument incorrectly and asked the wrong question, a frustrating and recurrent media problem. Hint: They did get the “irresponsible people” part right, but it is not about guns.
Media persists in seeing this—and showing it to you—as gun related, but access to guns was far far easier earlier in the nation’s history. Back then, paperwork and background checks were nonexistent. Federal controls were marginal. You could buy guns mail order, or in hardware stores, no questions asked. None of these bloodbaths occurred. Something else changed, not availability of guns. Keep this important detail in mind.
Tighter sales control and testing will have zero effect on 300 million firearms already in 100 million hands, so focusing on that is just pointless. Summary confiscation from the innocent—as much as Hillary, Barack and other anti-rights bigots would like (leaving only their government agents heavily armed) will not happen—because the public would literally rise up and resist.
And now recall—it is only in relatively recent times that this seemingly irrational-murderer phenomenon has arisen. It is not irrational. It is the Inspired Evil phenomenon. Guess who has been inspiring it—those “irresponsible people.”
The incessant, immoral and unethical glorification of the murderers, who the media likes to call “gunmen” (a sexist, offensive and bigoted term), creates and exacerbates the problem.
Consider the thousands of people, largely black, who are routinely murdered in ghettos, and ignored, providing a completely distorted view of what media falsely label the “gun violence” problem. And in San Bernardino we have a female perp—there goes the offensive “gunman” slur.
When the media gets rational and loses its bias and perverse promotional fascination with this modern-day blood sport, we might address the situation responsibly.
Watching the carnival, make that carnage-ival, in San Bernardino sort of crystallizes this key overlooked aspect—the real cause, the thing that has changed.
We could stand down that global force-projection approach (“Wow! This is just like Boston!” breathless reporter exclaims!), back off on the nuclear-option news coverage, and quell the fires of people glued to the 21st century blood-sport spectacle—starting with the spectacle perpetrators—those spaceman police gangs and the camera crews egging them on.
Murderers should be handled by police officers. An invasion might need the unruly mob authorities assembled in San Bernardino, but that would go badly. If that many people, assembled that quickly, in as much disarray and battle gear we witnessed on screen had to actually act together, roll tape, it would be the Keystone Kops.
The people responsible for allocating those massive resources, and expending that kind of taxpayer money in the promotion of maniac activity is absurd. Attracting people to television newscasts, conveniently increasing their advertising revenues by the way, and worst—dramatically encouraging copycats with it all—ought to be grounds for recalls and removals from office.
No crime-fighting justification can cover the overt time (sic) and added expense such an excessive response entails. Riddle me this: Are the officers of today that much less capable than federal agents of the 1920s?
The media circus and police party have given rise to the phenomenon of spree murder. Those two groups encourage it and must stop. With 6,000 black men murdering each other annually and making no news, anyone can see that a murderer outside a ghetto is not national news, except in a perverse, revenue-generating, gun-grabbing agenda and immoral way.
P.S. #1: If you strung together all the video and removed the sound, so you could perceive the editing more clearly, you would notice the same short splices over and over, almost hypnotically, with virtually no added news value for hours. It would make an interesting court challenge to the news license of a station. Their news credentials are spread pretty thin with these endless loop broadcasts.
P.S. #2: In my Instant Expertise class, you learn that if you don’t ask the exactly right question, you don’t get the exactly right answer. Figuring out the exactly right question can take quite a while, much more difficult than it seems at first. The paper did not get it right. “Why are people doing this?” It is not a gun question.
P.S. #3: We do have two facts that are often overlooked, especially by the media, and also by the left (but I repeat myself): The murderers can be and are stopped every time and always the same way. They are gunshot. What works? That does. The problem is that the shots come late, after harm is done. But it does answer the question of how to stop them.
The second fact, not universally agreed upon but understood by most, is that if you were personally in such a situation, and the murderer was about to shoot you (or your child), you would want a gun in hand. Almost everyone agrees. Not to go be a freelance police officer, but for personal defense at the point of no return.
The fanciful anti-rights notions of mishandling it, losing it, having it just “going off” or having it taken away are not factors, that’s mere hoplophobic (gun phobia) fantasy of the ill informed. When the chips are down, you want that gun. When you need a gun, nothing else will do. It is the only thing that stops these villains, and we all understand that.
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Alan Korwin is the author of 14 books, 10 of them on gun law. His book After You Shoot examines ways to lower your risks after a self-defense shooting. He has been invited twice to observe oral argument in gun cases at the U.S. Supreme Court. Reach him at GunLaws.com, where he is the publisher of Bloomfield Press.
