The location is New Orleans; home of many political footballs in the last decade. The incident was a shooting; the most (forgive me) triggering situation possible in American discourse. The number of victims was 17; more than were shot in Charleston. The setting? A playground.
A playground.
This is news from Louisiana on Sunday. Seventeen people were shot but survived when gunfire erupted on on a playground where a block party was going in New Orleans. If you did not hear about it, do not be surprised. It was barely news. It is amazing to think that there was not a huge media blitz, that there were not the standard outrageous, grandstanding tweets, or the ridiculous parade of pseudo-experts on CNN and MSNBC to spend hours talking about gun control. The endless blog posts, the overwrought editorials. None of those. And why is that?
Here is a description of the incident from the Chicago Tribune:
The Sunday night shootout happened as hundreds of people — possibly as many as 500 — gathered at the Bunny Friend Playground in what police described as a block party. A music video was also being filmed there. Police said neither event had a permit.
Officers were nearby overseeing a neighborhood parade when they received reports of a large crowd at the park. The shooting happened while they were on their way over to disperse the gathering. Two groups pulled out weapons and started firing, police said.
Local media reported a mad scramble as terrified people ran from the playground, leaving behind cellphones and IDs. The gunmen escaped.
Seventeen people were wounded, including 11 who were under the age of 21, authorities said Monday.
Well it certainly sounds like news. So let’s check in on our usual gun violence outragers.
Sally Kohn is usually first up with some terrible Tweet about gun control after a tragedy. But for the New Orleans mass shooting, this was her only tweet.
Yep, sorry, there’s nothing there. Because she didn’t. She was sans peep.
How about Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos? He usually has something to say about guns. But this time all he managed was:
Hmm. Well good old Piers Morgan normally can’t stop talking about guns. He’ll pop off them at the slightest hint that they may have been used for any reason. Like, I’m not even sure the gun has to be fired. If it just, you know, fell off a table onto someone’s foot and it really smarted, I feel like Piers would be on top of it. Certainly his tweet was outrageously outraged.
Yeeeahhhhhhh nope. And the same for Michael Ian Black, who pounced on gun control after the Oregon shooting, Chris Cuomo, who relishes taking to Twitter to fight “rabid righties” over gun control “solutions, Ezra Klein, who was all OVER the gang-related biker shootout in Texas … well you get the idea.
So OK fine that’s them, but how about Shannon Watts, founder of anti-gun group Moms Demand Action? You would think that at least she would have something to say. And you’d be right! You know, sorta.
Dozens shot in #NewOrleans; up to 16 injured after shooters fire into crowd https://t.co/QXK8sBYrtK #gunsense pic.twitter.com/GjrCfvdl41
— Shannon (@shannonrwatts) November 23, 2015
She tweeted the news article. But before you trip out on her, she did start off the day after the shooting with these timeless words:
Happy Thanksgiving Week – I'm thankful for @MomsDemand members fighting for #gunsense across the country! pic.twitter.com/aL4FZxU2km
— Shannon (@shannonrwatts) November 23, 2015
For comparison, check out her Charleston tweets. Notice the two from the day of especially.
The best part though? Watts wrote an article after the Charleston shooting titled “Don’t Let the Charleston Shooting Be Lost in the 24-Hour News Cycle. America Is Better Than That.” It was posted at Huffington Post the day after the shooting. Don’t let it get lost in the news. Well how about the news?
In cable news, MSNBC mentioned the story 5 times between the time of the shooting and the posting of this article. CNN mentioned it 10 times, mostly between midnight and 6am Monday. Fox News mentioned the story seven times. Many local stations around the country carried the story, as did, for example, NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, for exactly 20 seconds. That’s literal, I timed it.
The fact that there were no fatalities absolutely contributes to the lesser cable news coverage, but how to explain our liberal friends, who rush to Twitter every time a shell casing or ear plug is found on the ground? As I said, after other mass shootings, as any RedState reader knows, Twitter is wall-to-wall liberals and celebrities bashing guns and gun owners. MSNBC does dedicated coverage for hours.
And keep in mind that this was not a mere nothing. Seventeen people were hit by bullets. One was just a ten-year-old boy. Another will probably never walk again. At the time this article was written, several were still in the hospital. It is only chance that there were not more victims, and that none died. As many as 500 people were in the park for the block party and for the filming of a music video. This was a dramatic, mass shooting, with hundreds of Americans running for their lives in a panic in their own community from a hail of bullets. This doesn’t merit the Twitter deluge?
Here is something to know: the shooting took place between two rival groups and is believed to be gang-related. The police chief believes that it may have something to do with the heroin trade. That means it was a crime shooting, a shootout between criminals (and that witnesses, incidentally, appear afraid to talk to the police, though it is believed many in attendance know who the shooters were.)
As we see in Chicago pretty much every day, the white liberal thought leaders of the left aren’t interested in these kinds of shootings. The playground is in a black neighborhood. The shooters were in gangs. I ask you to ask yourself why there is not the usual overwhelming onslaught from liberal do-gooders that follows other mass shootings. Go ahead. Ask yourself.
And while you are at it, ask yourself why there were no protests on the campus of Youngstown State in Ohio. Don’t hate messages scrawled on university property usually elicit some kind of reaction? Or is it only certain hate messages? Do you see a pattern here?
Is it possible the liberal gun-grabbing nannies choose when to be outraged about guns based on who the victims are? Or who the perpetrators are? Or what neighborhood it was in? Surely one of you can answer that. Right?
Or maybe there’s no reason and it just got lost in the news cycle because Shannon Watts didn’t remind us not to let that happen. I guess we’ll never know. But I’m sure we’ll hear from them again. When the circumstances permit.
Oh by the way, you know who else had nothing to tweet? Hillary Clinton. Does Hillary not care about ten year old black boys being shot? After all, if Obama had a son, he might have looked like Damien Gaines’s son.
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