naturalplastic wrote:
Everyone "follows it" but only you are waiting on the guys race, and only you see this media thing that you're talking about.
I'm the only one talking about it (here), but I'm definitely not the only one seeing it or thinking about it, it's very well known by politically aware gun owners. Also no, not everyone follows it, as in I have a personal stake in the matter as these events are often used as political cudgels to advocate for more gun control that I oppose, and so I have an interest that most here do not, along with my general media/politics interests that are far more in depth than those of the average person.
naturalplastic wrote:
So elaborate. What is this media thing you're talking about?
Put simply, if the shooter is a cishet white male, the media will run with the story for as long as they can, they'll use it as a hook to bring up previous shootings, they'll have Democrats on as guests to furrow their brows and claim that whatever their last gun control scheme was would have prevented this tragedy if it weren't for those dastardly Republican obstructionists, the late night hosts will deliver impassioned monologues, so on and so forth. The volume gets turned up to 11 if they can link the shooter to a right wing cause, if he used an unusual weapon (the AR15 is actually the most common rifle in America, but liberals don't know that), if there's a racial angle, or some other way to further use the event for activism, that's what they're looking for.
If the shooter is
not a cishet white male, what you'll see is much more perfunctory coverage, maybe some of the same themes, but they'll try to gloss over anything politically inconvenient (a school shooting with a trans perpetrator, say), and generally let the story die as quickly as possible. Do you recall the King Soopers shooting a while back? You could literally see this happening in real time on Twitter, the outrage machine going from 60-0 in .5 seconds once the shooter's non-white identity was known, some of them were even dumb enough to say it out loud. You can see it right now with the Wisconsin Christmas parade attack, you don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to see that if a white guy with a bunch of anti black social media posts had plowed his truck through a Kwanzaa parade deliberately hitting people, you wouldn't see passive voice headlines about it and it would still be on every front page and on every network, as opposed to being scarcely mentioned.
naturalplastic wrote:
Some gunplay (like innocent children dying in their own homes from stray bullets from gang drive bys) tend to be done by Blacks, and other gunplay (like Columbine type events like this) tend to be done by Whites. But thats not the fault of the media.
Nope:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/201 ... phics.htmlQuote:
The notion spread from there. The Washington Post ran an op-ed titled “White men have much to discuss about mass shootings.” Salon declared that “White male privilege kills.”
What those initial Mother Jones numbers showed, though, was that white people weren’t overrepresented among mass shooters. The media outlet had found that roughly 70 percent of the shooters in mass killings were white—certainly a majority. But according to Census Bureau estimates for 2012, whites accounted for 73.9 percent of all Americans. (Keep in mind that the definition of whiteness is both vague and forever changing. In the 2010 census, the “white” category includes those whose families originate in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Mother Jones, for its part, categorizes one Moroccan immigrant killer as “white”; leaves the race field blank for a Turkish immigrant; and describes several shooters of Pakistani, Palestinian, Afghan and Kuwaiti extraction as “other.”)
I’m not sure where Kimmel and Leek got their stat about mass murders perpetrated by teenagers, but that figure, too, wasn’t that far off from U.S. demographics. At any rate, it certainly wasn’t true—as many argued then, and many do today—that mass shooters were “almost exclusively” or “disproportionately” or “nearly all” white. (Mass shooters are disproportionately men, however—more on that below.)
Since 2012, Mother Jones has added 29 more mass-shooting events to its database (and tweaked its definition of the crime to fit with new federal guidelines that placed the threshold at three victims instead of four). In this bigger data set, the proportion of white mass shooters drops down to 56 percent, by my count. Judging by those newer numbers, and the most current census estimate that 76.9 percent of Americans are white, the whites-are-overrepresented-among-mass-shooters meme appears even less accurate. Perpetrators that Mother Jones classifies as Asian make up 7.4 percent of the data set, versus an estimated 5.7 percent of the population, while those MoJo identifies as black represent 17.0 percent of the mass shooters in the database versus an estimated 13.3 percent of the population. According to this data set, then, Asians and black Americans are overrepresented among mass shooters by about the same proportion (a bit more than one-fourth) that whites are underrepresented. This means the population rate of mass shootings by whites (at least according to the tiny sample measured in the MoJo database) is 0.021 per 100,000 people, while the corresponding rate of mass shootings by blacks is 1.7 times higher, at 0.037.
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“The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.”
-- Robert Anton Wilson
30 Nov 2021, 5:51 pm
