The Other McCain

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Boulder: 10 Dead, Including Police Officer; Suspect in Custody, Not Yet Identified

Posted on | March 23, 2021 | Comments Off on Boulder: 10 Dead, Including Police Officer; Suspect in Custody, Not Yet Identified

There is something . . . off about this story, and I don’t know what it is yet. We saw the suspect walked out in handcuffs and yet, several hours later, police have still not identified him. While I have seen some speculation online about the gunman’s identity, the fact that police did not name him at their press conference strikes me as significant, because why not name him? Certainly, his identity will be public very soon, so what is accomplished by delaying the release of this information?

What this delay has done, in practical terms, is to allow the media to build the narrative that this is a gun-control story. The shooter reportedly used an AR-15-style weapon, and so the narrative is not about the shooter and his motive, but rather about his choice of weapon.

Is it paranoid to suspect that perhaps police delayed the identification of the shooter for this very reason? That is to say, it may be that police believed that publicly naming the shooter would have some undesired political consequence, and so they delayed this, to prevent the public from reacting in an undesirable way. Meanwhile, this delay gives the media a chance to spin it as a gun-control narrative, even though we have no reason to believe that any proposed gun-control measure (short of outright confiscation) could have prevented this particular shooting.

As always in cases like this, I discourage speculation about motives, particularly when we don’t know the identity of the shooter. Yet the delay in identifying the suspect strikes me as significant. Once we learn who it is, perhaps we will be able to deduce the reasons for the delay.

Anyway, here is what is actually known so far:

The Boulder Police Department confirmed 10 people are dead, including one Boulder Police officer, in a shooting at the King Soopers on Table Mesa Drive.
Boulder Police Chief Maris Herold confirmed Officer Eric Talley, 51, was the first to respond to the King Soopers minutes after initial 911 calls around 2:30 p.m. He was shot and killed. Talley had been with the department since 2010.
“I’m grateful for the police officers that responded, and I am so sorry about the loss of Officer Talley,” Herold said. . . .
The Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said the suspect is in custody and his office will do everything they can do to get justice for the victims.
“I also want to stress how incredibly sorry I am for all victims who were killed at King Soopers. These were people going about their day, doing their food shopping, and their lives were cut abruptly and tragically short by the shooter who is now in custody,” Dougherty said.
Officials confirmed the suspect went to the hospital. They say he is the only person injured that they’re aware of and they know of no other serious injuries at this point.

To summarize, we don’t actually know much yet — and this is unusual. I’ve covered plenty of events like this, and cannot remember any case where a mass-shooting suspect was in custody but police waited more than eight hours before publicly identifying the suspect, as in this case.

In a paranoid age, where trust of the media is at an all-time low, this concerns me, and not just because CNN is using this as an excuse to run 24/7 gun-control propaganda. Let me get ahead of that by saying that the vast majority of homicides in America (about 45 a day, on average) are committed with common pistols — 9mm, .380, .40 — and that the use of “assault rifles” in homicides is a statistical rarity. So the predictable push to ban “assault rifles” in the wake of this Boulder massacre will be in contradiction of facts and logic. For 10 years, beginning in 1994, we had a federal ban and, after Congress allowed it to expire in 2004, it was demonstrated to have no impact on the overall level of violent crime.




 

Category: Colorado, Crime

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