Mass Shootings are Not Just a "White Male" Problem

Juan Carlos Garcia sits next to a makeshift memorial for the victims of a mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub Monday, June 13, 2016, in downtown Orlando, Fla. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

As I was browsing Reddit this morning I came across a picture that showed the perpetrators of mass shootings from just this year alone. The thing made immediately clear is that the mass shooting myth that white men are the primary perpetrators is a complete and total lie.

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But I want to make clear that race isn’t something I’m concerned about here. As you’ll see by the picture, mass shooters run the gambit of race and gender, which tells me that race and gender aren’t really the deciding factors as to why somebody would commit a mass shooting.

Two things struck me. One, that we’re living in an age when the media has the public so wrapped around its finger that it can push lies so blatantly without worry, and two, that we’re nowhere near as focused as we should be on the causes behind mass shootings as we are on irrelevant or tertiary things.

Here is the picture in question. As you can see, these shooters have killed four or more people during a single shooting qualifying them as mass shooters according to the law and most don’t fit into the media’s white male narrative. You have men, women, Hispanic, Asian, and black as well as white.

Whenever a shooting happens, a talking point about the dangers of white men finds its legs again within the media. For some reason, these are the only times the media wants to focus on the fact that mass shootings occur. Chicago’s mass shooting, which happened around the same time as the El Paso/Dayton shootings was swept so far under the rug that many people still haven’t heard about it.

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This is a horrible thing, not just because it’s racist to single out a race for this kind of crime, but because many of these mass shootings are happening in areas where the left more or less ignores the violence that is happening. In fact, just earlier today, I wrote a post about a video of Baltimore residents talking about the violence that regularly occurs in their neighborhoods that they say no one seems to talk or care about.

This neglect leaves them open for even more violence.

What’s more, we only seem to hear about the violence of white men as being a symptom of being white and male. Yet, no one is just shooting people up in a vacuum. There’s a reason behind it that, for reasons I can’t find valid in any logical sense, we’re completely ignoring.

The reasons can be many. Perhaps there is mental illness, or perhaps it’s a territory or drug-based mass killing due to gang warfare. Maybe it’s a crime of passion. It might be due to radical extremism of the political or religious variety.

The media is only focused on a narrow string of criteria. Everything else gets ignored and memory-holed. The Dayton story, for instance, only checks a few boxes, but not others and so it’s not talked about nearly as much as El Paso, which checks all the boxes.

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In fact, I bet you wouldn’t be able to pin the event to the vast majority of faces in the picture I posted above. You probably can’t because you never heard about it from a media that is absolutely choosey when it comes to what it wants to pearl-clutch about.

We need to look more than skin deep when it comes to trying to solve the problem of mass shootings. Stop trying to blame inanimate objects instead of the people pulling the trigger. Stop trying to ignore something because it’s politically incorrect to mention it.

People are dying, and what the media is currently doing is only getting more people killed.

(h/t: Reddit)

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