A Mass Shooting Happened Yesterday But You Didn’t Hear Anything About It
On Thursday, a man reportedly dressed in body armor ran into a crowded room and opened fire with a high-powered assault-style rifle, killing three and injuring six. But television stations didn’t cut away to report on the horrific event. In fact, it’s likely this is the first you’re hearing about it
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I've discussed this a lot with folks from where I'm from, mostly my husband. About a month after the Columbine shooting, a 15-year-old went on a shooting spree in a high school in my hometown. He wounded 6 people. The Columbine massacre was, of course, more deadly and was eclipsing anything else in the news, but the Heritage High shooting only got regional coverage at best.
Then after the Aurora shootings and the Newtown shootings, my husband and I talked about this...there have been shootings on the streets for YEARS in predominantly black and Latino, low-income areas, including school shootings but also other public places. Kids die of gun violence every day in these places. My cousin lives right outside Philadelphia and it seems like every time I go down there, she's telling me a story about some other kid who got wounded by gunfire.
But the ones that get large national news, widespread grief and relief aid and sympathy are largely enacted by white men in predominantly white, affluent towns. And that's not even where gun violence happens most often. And it's not that the grief of those parents is any less than the grief of parents in high-crime areas...but the way the news media presents it, it's often as if the shooting is more tragic because it happened in a sleepy little town where people knew each other and left their doors unlocked rather than Chicago or Los Angeles. And were white.
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