The Washington Post Clowns Itself While Trying to Make Mass Shootings Seem Frequent

As radio show hostess and pro-gun advocate Dana Loesch once said, the legacy media loves mass shootings. If there’s blood on the ground, you can bet the mainstream media will send reporters to point their cameras straight it and give you round-the-clock coverage.

Terms and conditions may apply, such as the skin color of the shooter and party-controlled locations like Chicago or Baltimore.

As my colleague Brad Slager covered earlier, the media has been having a field day with recent mass shootings that happened one after another. This prompted the Washington Post to make an agitprop visual in its paper that displays the names of victims killed in mass shootings since 1966.

A stunning page in today's Post print edition: the name of every mass shooting victim since 1966. pic.twitter.com/M8wMLJIh1J

— Mark W. Smith (@markdubya) August 11, 2019

As Slager noted, the page is sobering to be sure. However, it really denotes just how rare these mass shootings are. As WaPo spread their image around for all to look at and sway over to their argument, those paying attention saw that important details were being left out.

“The WaPost unintentionally puts recent shootings in perspective. This is a very rare event and marginal cause of deaths—even deaths by murder,” tweeted Georgetown law professor and author Randy Barnett. “But if we keep politicizing these events to accomplish our policy objectives, we just might manage to make them more common.”

https://twitter.com/RandyEBarnett/status/1160590500950417408

Robert Tracinski noted that if you put the victims of lightning strikes back to back, you’d get a similar result.

This is virulent innumeracy: trying to make a comparatively rare event look much bigger than it is by the way you print it out,” tweeted Tracinski. “Figure out how many of these pages it would take to print the names of everybody struck by lightning since 1966.”

This is virulent innumeracy: trying to make a comparatively rare event look much bigger than it is by the way you print it out.

Figure out how many of these pages it would take to print the names of everybody struck by lightning since 1966. https://t.co/d39heZHW0a

— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) August 12, 2019

Another point was made comparing the “rare” case of late-term abortions, of which 10,000-12,000 happen every year. Compare that to the 1,196 victims of mass shootings since the mid-’60s.

The trend on mass shootings is a serious issue, but I’m not sure that this is a good way to frame it.

For context: Many on the left argue that late-term abortions are very rare and therefore not a big issue, but there are 10,000-12,000 such abortions every year. https://t.co/FnO8kPp0st

— (((AG))) (@AGHamilton29) August 11, 2019

Outside of the fact that this is clearly WaPo attempting to narrative-craft some outrage to help grease the wheels of the Democrat anti-gun agenda, you’ll notice that a lot of ignoring is going on as well.

According to the Chicago Tribune, 1,636 people have been shot in Chicago just this year, yet you don’t see the Washington Post giving them a page in their paper. What’s more, you probably never will. The narrative it creates on its own doesn’t jibe with the carefully crafted narrative the media wants to put forward, bringing Loesch’s famous quote into stark reality.

“Many in legacy media love mass shootings. You guys love it,” Loesch said during her 2018 CPAC speech. “Now I’m not saying that you love the tragedy. But I am saying that you love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold to you and many in the legacy media in the back (of the room).”

“And notice I said ‘crying white mothers’ because there are thousands of grieving black mothers in Chicago every weekend, and you don’t see town halls for them, do you?” Loesch continued. “Where’s the CNN town hall for Chicago? Where’s the CNN town hall for sanctuary cities?”

And where’s the Washington Post page for Chicago’s victims?

When you sit down to really consider the fact that WaPo seems to greatly care about one kind of victim but not the other, it makes it pretty gross how, all things considered, the paper is actually utilizing these mass shooting victims as props by printing their names, and not actually honoring them.

Their names are just useful enough to create a line on a page that can fit into other lines on a page, which then makes it seem like these lines combined make claims that we need to give up freedoms to be valid. This is tragic considering that mass shootings are horrific enough as it is.

In truth, the Washington Post really showed us how rare these shootings are and that they’re disgusting enough to use your name in order to push their agenda whether you like it or not.