Another day, another white guy running amok with a gun in the US, or so it seems. You’d be greatly mistaken, of course. Which is what happens when you make the fundamental error of mistaking what you see on the TV or the internet for reality.
A recent Pew survey tested Americans on how they perceived their country, compared to reality. Suffice to say, perceptions were wildly out of kilter with reality. Most of the perceptions surveyed were related to the proportions of various minority groups. In every case — black, Jewish, Hispanic, Christian, homosexual, “trans” — Americans greatly over-estimated the proportion of each.
Scholar Wilfred Reilly argues that this is almost certainly due to the gross misrepresentation of American society on TV and in cinema. Reilly surveyed American crime television, for instance, and found that whites were depicted as offenders in far greater proportion than they actually are.
Reilly argues that similar misperceptions are manufactured by the media in regard to “mass shootings”.
A common mistake normies make is believing that the media reports the news: i.e., if there are a bunch of stories about (whites and Blacks killing each other with AR-15s), this must be a thing that actually happens often as vs just a topic that tests well for drawing views.
Nah.
In fact, almost all “mass shootings” are committed with handguns, not the demonised AR-15. Nearly all are at the very lowest rung of the official definition of a mass shooting: officially, in the US, the killing of three or more people without a cooling-off period.
What this means is that a host of gang disputes, drive-bys and robberies-turned-violent are classified as “mass shootings”. Given the sad reality of the profile of criminal offending in the US, a disproportionate number of shooters will be black.
With the latest tragedy, the July 4th massacre in Chicago, the rush is on to pigeon-hole the killer according to everyone’s prejudice. The killer is undeniably white, so the crime is guaranteed not to vanish from headlines as fast as Darrell Brooks’ vehicular mass-murder in Waukesha, nor Frank James’ attempted mass shooting on a Brooklyn subway.
So, of course, everyone is desperate to pin the guy on their ideological enemies. Rightists are convinced he’s an Antifa/Bernie Bro radical, leftists are adamant that he’s a Trump supporter. There’s slender evidence to support both claims — and even more evidence that this loon is just all over the place like a mad woman’s custard.
The media’s wilful misrepresentation of reality is amply demonstrated by Fox News’ list of “high-profile shooting[s] in the United States”. Note that only one of the ten shootings listed cites the race of the perpetraor: “a white gunman” in Buffalo.
What Fox News quietly omits is that, of the other nine shootings and eleven offenders, two were white, one Hispanic, one Chinese and six black.
But even this picture is distorted by selectivity: “high profile” merely means the ones the media want you to notice. What they want you to notice is what fits their agenda.
There are in fact some excellent resources on mass shootings. The Mother Jones Mass Shootings Database is a constantly-updated, publicly-available resource that records a wealth of information on every mass shooting, from the number of victims to the race and gender of the perpetrator, whether there were prior or current signs of mental illness and even the type of weapon and where it was obtained.
All it takes is a rudimentary grasp of Excel and a wealth of facts that are often diametrically opposite to the media narrative are right at your fingertips.
The internet is the greatest library of information in human history — use it.
