We were walking to our offices in Jersey City Heights Sunday night (which, interestingly enough, also happens to be where our EIC lives) when we found this epic failery. Friday's Metro News edition featured this cover, referencing last week's San Bernardino mass shooting.
Fourteen people were killed. Twenty-one others were injured. Families are broken down at losing their loved ones. Yet, with all this, Metro News-along with other outlets-had the sense to ask,"Was It Terrorism?"
............
If someone strikes you horizontally across the face with their fingers and palm, did they slap you?
Let's get something out of the way right now. Any time someone takes any assortment of weaponry and unloads on innocent people in public-it's terrorism. Shootings are always dangerous to human life. And such acts will ALWAYS scare civilians-regardless of the perpetrator's intentions.
As alluded to in the Metro paper, the FBI initially hesitated calling this attack terrorism because there were no links to Islamic militants (new information suggests one of the shooters pledged allegiance to ISIS). In that context, the media following suit with this "Was It Terrorism" narrative, is tinged with racism.
Why, in today's America, do mass shootings have to be connected with Muslim extremists for media to deem it terrorism? What happened to the days where an All-American high school student killing 20+ of his classmates with an Ak-47 would get the T-word blasted across our front pages? .
The Columbine and Virginia Tech tragedies got the "massacre"label; the Colorado shootings got James Holmes a few "possibly mentally ill" comments; a 2012 mass shooting at a Sikh temple barely even registered on media scales.
What do most of those mass shootings have in common? Almost all white males carried them out. Matter of fact, white males have carried out most masss shootings since 9/11. Yet, they've almost always served less prison time than their darker counterparts.
We're not saying anything you don't know already. That is, unless you're the type who reads Donald Trump Monthly, or whatever Koch-collabo filth he'd name his hypothetical magazine.
Just some short words for consideration.