A mass shooting that happened in Florida over a week ago is still in the news. Stranger yet, the same shooting has inspired an anti-gun march on March 24 (#MarchForOurLives). What is going on? Why is this happening now? Indeed, why didn't it happen after the Las Vegas massacre? Only time will tell.
But what we do know for sure is the memory of the 17 people killed by a military-grade weapon is sticking, and this fact has alarmed the NRA and forced it out of the shadows. The death cult began an offensive yesterday with an attack on mainstream media, which, according to the NRA's point of view, has failed to do the usual—expire the mass shooting story after two days or focus on the positive side of the tragedy: its heroes, their hobbies, and how they will be remembered. This is exactly what followed the shooting in Kentucky that left two young people dead on January 23. That story was reported and forgotten on the same day. What happened in Kentucky should have happened in Florida. Why wasn't the media quickly moving on to the next big thing?
NRA's answer: The media loves mass shootings because they're good for ratings. Also good for ratings are crying white mothers ("ratings gold"). Proof for this claim? The media totally ignores crying black mothers in Chicago (ratings dirt). This is exactly what the NRA representative/death priestess Dana Loesch said at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
And so race entered the gun debate by a very strange door. One opened by Loesch for the purpose of not helping black Americans but discrediting the media. Crying black mothers and dead black men were rushed in to prove a point, and, once it was made, were rushed back to their crying and dying on the streets of Chicago. Her point: The NRA and guns are not to blame for mass shootings but a press whose profits depend on high ratings. If the ratings for mass shootings were low, then they would have rapidly moved onto another story—such as Trump's bald spot—and treated these crying white mothers like crying black mothers.
But the problem with this strategy and its imagery is, of course, we're no longer seeing crying women on TV. What we're seeing instead are angry teenagers who have moved past the point of tears and want action.
To conclude this post, let's return to the crying black women and white women. Here, again, we find an issue on the left being twisted and utilized by those on the right. The reason why the right so often turns to this simple but effective tactic is because facts tend to be on the side of the left and the poor. The fact in this particular case has two parts: one, black suffering is under-represented and white suffering is over-represented in the media; two, the function of this imbalance is to cheapen black lives (exactly what BLM is all about). In this way, cops, the protectors of white privilege and wealth, can kill poor black people with little to no fear of punishment.
The second part of the fact was not, of course, mentioned by Loesch because all she needed for the attack was something that could not be contested, that was actual and provable. When in a crisis, the NRA always finds that it has almost no facts in its bag of tricks. What is not contained in all this stuff about good guys with guns or the mumbo jumbo devoted to something written hundreds of years ago is reality itself. This is why the NRA's main arguments are inefficacious and easily beaten. If you are going bring down the media, you need facts. But when you are on the right (or the NRA), most them are not on your side.
