Saturday, July 25, 2015

Some Lives Matter More Than Others

The last two days have seen two separate and horrific events.

Wednesday in Broken Arrow OK five members of a single family were slaughtered in their home. A sixth victim clings to life.

Thursday two people were killed and nine wounded in a Lafayette LA movie theater. The suspect killed himself as police closed in.

Keep an eye on how the media treats these two stories. Both, of course, are terrifying and tragic. Both deserve national attention. However, I suspect we'll hear much more about the LA killings that those in OK.

Why?

Because  in LA the killer used a gun. In OK the victims were stabbed and hacked to death.

Given the liberal persuasion of the mainstream media, expect the by now familiar cavalcade of anti-gun propaganda. Also expect the media to salivate over the depiction of the shooter as an angry white man and a right-wing extremist. In addition, the media will also ignore the fact that the death toll in OK was higher than in LA.

In other news, media attention and #blacklivesmatter protesters are focused on the case of Sandra Bland, a black woman who hung herself while in jail in Hempstead TX. While it seems that her arrest was questionable, to say the least, there is little doubt that she committed suicide while imprisoned. Another tragic and regrettable death of a black person while in police custody, this case certainly merits a close examination, which it will get.

However, where is the mainstream media and the #blacklivesmatter folks when it comes to multiple deaths of blacks in Chicago?

10 dead, 34 wounded in weekend violence
Much of the shooting was concentrated in the East and West Garfield Park, Lawndale and Humboldt Park neighborhoods on the West Side, from about Division Street south to Ogden Avenue east of Cicero Avenue and west of California Avenue.

Eighteen of the people wounded over the weekend were shot within those boundaries, including four people shot a few hours apart near St. Louis Avenue and Grenshaw Street early Saturday. Two of the 18 died.
Wanna guess the predominant ethnicity of those neighborhoods?

I guess the good folks at #blacklivesmatter didn't focus on the slaughter of blacks in Chicago because they were too busy booing Martin O'Malley for saying "All lives matter."
Several dozen demonstrators interrupted the former Maryland governor while he was speaking here at the Netroots Nation conference, a gathering of liberal activists, demanding that he address criminal justice and police brutality. When they shouted, "Black lives matter!" a rallying cry of protests that broke out after several black Americans were killed at the hands of police in recent months, O'Malley responded: "Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter."

The demonstrators, who were mostly black, responded by booing him and shouting him down.
According to them, only black lives matter.

And we're the ones being called "racist."

un-friggin'-believable...


5 comments:

Bag Blog said...

My daughter and her two of her friends were in Chicago over the 4th of July. Although they enjoyed their time there, several times they feared for their lives - two of the times were serious. Once they were out on the Navy Pier when someone set off firecrackers of some sort sounding like gunfire. Mass amounts of people poured out of the mall and down the already crowded pier in hysteria. Shay (ex-Army guy) got the girls behind a tree and held them close. My daughter said she had never realized how quickly a mob could get out of control and the danger it could cause. Then later they were riding bikes along the lake when the crowd on either side of them turned violent and started shouting and going at each other. They were caught in the middle, but were left untouched. In both incidents, the crowds were predominately Black. When I heard that there had been something like 55 shootings and ten killings over the weekend in Chicago, I was fearful myself.

It is funny that when we have traveled to South America or Europe, people here at home say things like, "Do you think it is safe there?" Hmm, it may be safer in other countries than it is here in the USA.

Old NFO said...

The sad part is that your comments are exactly correct... The 'focus' of the MSM is always going to be on the outliers that can be used for gun control, not on the reality of the projects/BoB shootings/stabbings/killings. Those are too hard to do anything with.

Well Seasoned Fool said...

Adding to NFO's comments, nutjobs are soft targets tailor made for political posturing. Much more satisfying than tackling tough, even intractable problems.

CenTexTim said...

BB - Scary stuff. Glad they're all okay.

NFO/WSF - yeah, let's not deal with the problems. Let's just focus on the sensational.

The sad thing is that IMO those problems are solvable. Look at how the military used to be able to turn juvenile delinquents and gang members into Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines. Of course, that was back when DIs could cuss and lay hands on recruits. Now it's all PC and warm & fuzzy crap.

CenTexTim said...

Toejam - Hope your daughter stays safe. I've got friends there, and hear stories about the decline of the waterfront.