Mandatory Credit: Photo by AP/REX/Shutterstock (9190148a)
Sutherland Springs Shooting. Law enforcement officers gather in front of the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs after a fatal shooting, in Sutherland Springs, Texas
Shooting, Sutherland Springs, USA – 05 Nov 2017
This would seem to be quite the incongruent post but, if you follow along, you’ll soon come to understand the linkage I’m attempting to make.
On the heels of Sunday’s shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, Demorats, Leftists and the American Media Maggots came out in full force and barked sharply about firearms, gun deaths, white people. SLF. Standard Leftist Fare.
Then they began to excoriate those who were sending prayers, as did certain personnel in my comments section. Typical Leftist pap: “What is needed, clearly, are more prayers and no gun restriction. Oh and thoughts. Thoughts and prayers, yup, that will do it.”
Democratic leaders and gun control advocates shut down the immediate and familiar outpouring of “thoughts and prayers” for the victims of the South Texas church shooting on Sunday, calling for stronger gun laws.
“Represent,” Time, “represent.”
Because, well, “thoughts and prayers” refer to religious people and everyone knows that religious people are stupid and Caucasoid and ill educated, driving around in Ford FX4 Off Road pickup trucks with loud motors and damaged exhaust pipes, flying Confederate banners and Ed Gillespie bumper stickers with Gadsden Flag front license plates, looking to run down little Muslim kids and children with higher melanin counts. Race baiting? Nah.
It’s all you ig’nant Southerners with that easily-mocked and stupid drawl like, well, Bill Clinton. Wait. That’s not what you meant.
When Speaker Paul Ryan wrote this on Twitter:
He got this loving retort from highly-paid and relevant actor extraordinaire Wil Wheaton:
These social media responses as well:
And lest we forget that profound and insightful Teutonic Keith Olbermann, Mein Fuhrer:
The embracing, kind, inclusive and understanding Chelsea Handler?
How odd that Laura Ingraham happened to address the issue on her Monday show.
Of course, as we all know, it’s only Caucasoids who are mass murderers. Just ask Ruben Navarrette.
Except for one thing: those damnable facts. It’s too bad Tucker didn’t have immediate access to the facts — facts even acknowledged by Leftist organs. First, from Slate.com:
Mass Shooters Aren’t Disproportionately White
by Daniel Engber
Where the myth came from, and what it gets right and wrong about the demographics of mass killings.
Stephen Paddock shot more than 500 people from the windows of his Las Vegas hotel room Sunday night, killing 58 of them. In the days since, a familiar story has been passed around the internet about the blinkered way in which we talk about these sorts of massacres. We’re so quick to blame Islamic terrorists, this story goes, that we don’t address the stark, distressing truth about mass shootings. The killers aren’t angry immigrants, by and large. They’re white men.
Of course they are. Ask any Leftist, Demorat or American Media Maggot. Or Ruben Navarrette.
“These shooters are almost exclusively coming from a single socio-economic class and racial group,” wrote actor Cole Sprouse in a widely shared Twitter thread. We must now address “what part of whiteness influences this kind of Petri dish for gun violence and killing.”
Because, after all, actors are particularly insightful and full of professorial knowledge.
This wasn’t just a social media phenomenon. The Huffington Post published Sprouse’s tweets as a “Powerful Take on Whiteness and Mass Shootings.” An article in Elle called the link between white men and mass shootings “a general rule” and proposed that “our refusal to confront toxic white male violence is why this problem will metastasize.” The progressive news site ThinkProgress said that “when we talk about mass shootings, we are talking about white men.” Newsweek wondered if “white men commit mass shootings out of a sense of entitlement.” A CNN opinion piece bemoaned the fact that “America has silently accepted the rage of white men.”
In a narrow sense, these stories are correct: The plurality of mass killers are white. But the notion that white men of privilege are disproportionately represented among mass shooters—indeed, that they make up “nearly all” of them—is a myth.
“Oh myth, can I have another cup of coffee please?
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.”)
Uh-oh. Leaks in the hull?
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.)
Of course mass shooters are disproportionately men. Ask anyone in Chicago.
Here’s another way of looking at it: Instead of asking why so many mass shooters are white, we could ask what it is about mass shootings that differentiates them, even to a small extent, from the broader trend of racial inequalities in murder rates. Why might the huge disparities that we see in homicides, born of systematic disadvantage, be diminished (though not reversed) in our most extreme episodes of violence?
Don’t stop there. Keep going.
All of that is a very long way of saying the data don’t support the whites-are-overrepresented-among-mass-shooters meme. On the other hand, they do back up the notion that these killers are nearly always men. In the Mother Jonesdatabase, 97 percent of the listed killers are men; in the one from USA Today, that number is 94 percent.
Guilty. Then from NYMag.com:
Whiteness Doesn’t Cause Mass Shootings
by Jesse Singal
Yesterday’s horrific massacre in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in which 26-year-old Devin P. Kelley killed 26 people and injured many others at the town’s First Baptist Church, has spurred the tragically familiar call from Americans begging for politicians to take some action — any action — in response to what feels like an epidemic of mass shootings. Today, many are arguing for enhanced gun-control legislation, perhaps legislation which would take into account what appears to be an important connectionbetween domestic violence and these sorts of acts.
But in a Democracy Now! segment from earlier today, George Ciccariello-Maher, a political science professor at Drexel University, made a different case. He argued that while it’s important to examine the policy ramifications of Kelley’s murders, including the possibility that “targeted gun control for domestic violence [offenders]” or similar policies might prove effective, the bigger conversation should be about the fact that he was white.
Evil Caucasoids. Evil religious Caucasoids. Evil Constitution-embracing Caucasoids.
But the full damage done by these whiteness-violence claims goes deeper. And to explain this, it’s important to explain why some people are making these arguments in the first place. When Ciccariello-Maher and others posit whiteness as an explanation for violence or other bad behavior on the part of whites, they are, in part, offering a rejoinder to the pernicious idea that blackness can explain such behavior on the part of blacks. As many scholars have shown, perhaps most comprehensively the Harvard University professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad in his excellent book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, this idea has a long, ugly history.
Thank you.
Let’s say, for a minute, that Engber is wrong and mass shooters are disproportionately white. If this is reason enough to claim that their race is an important causal factor, then a conservative interlocutor could easily jump in and say, “Oh, well then I guess blackness is causing black crime, since black people commit violent crimes at higher rates.” That is a real discrepancy, after all — it’s one that can be explained by socioeconomic factors, including institutionalized racism and urban neglect on the part of predominately white American power structures, but it’s also easily exploited by racists as “proof” of the sorts of claims spotlighted in Muhammad’s book. Or what about Europe? In those European countries that have been hit by recent mass-casualty attacks, those attacks have been overwhelmingly committed by Muslims. Does it follow from this that we need to talk about “Muslim culture,” or that Muslims are essentially violent in a way Christians and Jews are not?
Leftist excuses made by Leftists taking into account every Leftist meme possible. You have to see beyond that. And I’m sure you do.
Leftists believe there is no such thing as an evil person, only a misunderstood person. They couldn’t be more wrong, ignorant or naive themselves.
Look, Leftists, I can see you a mile away. So can Conservatives. You don’t respect the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights. In your world everything is gray and in flux. I get it. People of any religious bent are evil — except for Muslims, because you fear them and at least recognize that if you go against them they’ll kill your ass. I get your cowardice on that, too.
I also understand your final play: gun confiscation. Outright confiscation. Some Leftists are brave enough to talk for the rest of you and advocate it. I at least admire the honesty and clarity of those few Leftist souls making that argument. It’s why I admire Bernie Sanders. At least he’ll tell you he’s a Socialist all day long.
Bottom line? Guess what? Gun confiscation isn’t going to occur.
Unless, of course, you wish to revisit 1861.
BZ
There you go again with the pesky facts… Well done, sir!
Thank you kindly. Some, however, are not pleased with me.
BZ
Good post BZ. I live approx. 130 miles from where that shooting took place. What the left doesn’t understand is that life here in Texas for the most part is about God, family, Texas, country and yes guns. Without the ability to defend oneself down here we know there is no freedom. We do pray for the victims and their families that were slaughtered by the evil Antifa asshole that shot them. We thank God Mr Willeford was able to end it all and keep others from being killed. And we do despise those who would politicize such a tragedy. The left can bark all they want but to their displeasure Texans will always have the means to defend themselves. Should they care to get froggy and try to seize our weapons at some time in the future can predict all will not end well. Marxists beware!
Excellent to know.
BZ
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