Most left of center commentators lost
interest in the Capital Gazette shooting in Annapolis Maryland soon after it
became obvious that there was little to no connection to Trumpian rhetoric
slighting the “fake news” media. For any number of good reasons, media face time
procured by the state’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy,
was minimal.
Moments after the shooting, Murphy issued a dog-eared, often repeated refrain: “I’m sick and
tired of this. My colleagues have accepted horrific mass violence and made the
deliberate choice to do nothing about it. If politicians wanted to reduce gun
violence, they would do their jobs and pass laws that we know would make a
difference.”
Both Murphy and Blumenthal have presented themselves as the political
poster children of the anti-gun movement ever since a shooter opened fire with
an AR15 semi-automatic rifle on school children in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.
Demagoguery, in this case, is pointless though, as ever,
politically useful. The weapon used in
Annapolis by Jarrod Ramos was a shotgun, the kind of allowable self-defense
rifle former Vice President Joe Biden once recommended to frustrate mass
murderers approaching from our driveways.
The Capital Gazette shooting was personal, not political. Ramos had sued the paper unsuccessfully for defamation, and the newspaper's e-mail cache was bulging with threatening comments. Disputes with papers usually are personal. Once the clouds of speculation parted, about two days after the shooting, we discovered that Ramos had been nursing a “longstanding dispute with the newspaper.”
Just before telling details began surfacing – the devil was
in them – there was a short window of opportunity for free range speculation.
For a moment there, it seemed as if a Trumpeter, armed perhaps with a “military
styled weapon” had turned his anger upon a “fake news” paper.
But, sadly for some, this was not the case, although an
account in the Baltimore Sun does
manage to smuggle into its primary coverage, a day after the shooting, a
Trumpian reference: “The shooting, which came amid months of unrelenting verbal
and online attacks on the ‘fake news media’ from politicians and others from
President Donald Trump on down …” The Baltimore Sun and the Capital Gazette are
sister publications.
The shooter, a loner who found personal communication
awkward but anonymous communication liberating -- where have we seen this before? -- was animated by vengeance. The
rife he used was not a “military-style weapon,” but a commonplace shotgun. The
place of attack was what has been called “a soft target.” And, not
unimportant, the response time of police and others was a brief 60 seconds;
it does not get much better than that. Also, first responders did not linger on
the periphery tremulously waiting for reinforcements; they raced into the
firing.
Given all these givens, it becomes possible to ring from
them some valuable lessons. Reporters and commentators -- always wary of being
thought pedantic or, worse, moralistic -- call such lessons “takeaways.” But
they are lessons containing invaluable bits of wisdom.
1) The premature ejaculations of passionate and
ideologically committed “journalists” are nearly worthless, even when they may
be right. It’s always a good idea to wait until the facts that shape the truth
catch up to fanciful speculation before you press “send” on your column or
report. Sometimes, this is a matter of hours; at the most, possibly a day. “A
lie,” according to the old adage “can travel halfway around the world, while
the truth is still getting its boots on.”
2) It may be nearly impossible to prevent mass shootings,
but response time and other commonsense measures can mitigate disasters.
3) Soft targets – such as schools -- are hardened when the
castle has a moat and the guards at the drawbridge are armed and dangerous to repel
unwanted invaders.
4) It IS possible, in schools especially, to involve the
whole mini-polis in preventative measures, which necessarily would involve
predictive profiling. Israel does a splendid job in this regard, without
compromising the moral strictures of students and faculty – Connecticut, not so
much. Think for a moment before answering the following questions: Would high
school classes in the proper use of sporting rifles help or hurt efforts to
reduce school shootings? Would trained, armed security personnel in schools,
along with mechanical and technological speed bumps to easy entry, reduce
crucial response time in the case of school shootings? Would efforts among
students to include in their social embrace students who are “loners” dull the
edge of murderous rage? To what extent are good manners, enforced by
enlightened discipline, social prophylactics?
5) Not everyone who cries “wolf! wolf!”, when there is no
wolf – among politicians, almost always for political gain -- should receive
our unexamined approval.
6) Finally, we all should reject tendentious arguments. The
notion that the assault on the Capital Gazette by a man nursing a private,
score-settling, vengeful but deliberative motive is causally connected to Trump’s
intemperate and generalized attack on the public media is a textbook illustration
of the post hoc ergo propter hoc (“after
this, therefore because of this”) fallacy. “The
shooting came,” the Associated Press(AP) reported,
“amid months of verbal and online attacks on the ‘fake news media’ from
politicians and others from President Donald Trump on down."
Comments