RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Wednesday, an angry ex-employee got a gun, put a silencer on it, went to the MillersCoors facility where he had once worked, and shot five people to death before shooting himself. One would expect to have a barrage of news stories about America’s gun violence problem and the need to ban guns. After all, on Tuesday, before the shooting happened, the Democrat candidates were all over each other trying to explain why each would be more effective at destroying the Second Amendment. Instead, though, we got crickets.

The reason for the media’s silence became apparent when the media identified the shooter: 51-year-old Anthony Ferrill was black. This meant that the media couldn’t use its white supremacist narrative to justify grabbing guns.

The narrative broke down even further when social media posts revealed that Ferrill may well have been an Elizabeth Warren supporter, an assumption arising from the fact that his wife proudly posted a selfie of herself last year at an Elizabeth Warren rally:

On her various social media pages, which have now been deleted, Ferrill’s wife posted photos of her family and expressing liberal political views. In July 2019, Ferrill’s wife attended a speech by U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren at South Division High School Gym in Milwaukee. Following the speech, Ferrill’s wife took a photo with the Massachusetts senator.

If the media were genuinely committed to gutting the Second Amendment, they would have promoted this shooting equally with other mass shootings. That they didn’t is a reminder that Democrat values tend to be situational. Guns are all right in some hands but not in others.

For example, even though Democrat-run inner cities are a place of routine gun carnage, the media tend to ignore all the black-on-black shooting that takes place in those cities, despite the sad fact that those shootings account for most of the non-suicide gun deaths in America. This silence suggests that Democrats don’t care about blacks, no matter how much they claim to.

Democrats are also loath to dwell on these shootings because they invariably occur in tightly gun-controlled communities and are carried out by people possessing illegal guns. Thus, anti-gun laws made no difference to the deadly outcome.

The media really get agitated when a person who is not a member of one of the Left’s protected classes kills with a gun. The most agitating thing of all is when the person kills white people. In other words, because most media members are themselves white, they are most offended when their own kind is killed. Again, this has to do with situational, not actual, ethics.

Democrats are wrong to demand gun control. Guns out are there, making them a Pandora’s box that cannot be closed. Denying the legions of decent Americans the right to have guns for self-defense, whether against the criminal in their midst or (God forbid!) against a government gone rogue, is morally and constitutionally wrong. But what’s even more wrong about the Democrats’ antipathy to guns is that they only really care about guns when people like them are the victims and when the shooter does not belong to a favored victim identity group.

And that’s why Anthony Ferrill’s vile, criminal act is being memory-holed as surely as the media have memory-holed the fact that it was a Bernie Bro that tried to kill the entire Republican congress a few years ago.