The Other McCain

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Yet Another Inconvenient Mass Murder Destined for the Media’s Memory Hole

Posted on | November 24, 2022 | 2 Comments

Walmart gunman Andre Bing

Wednesday I was watching CNN (so you don’t have to) and they were still leading every hour with Tuesday night’s shooting at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia. The gunman killed six people and wounded four others before turning the gun on himself and committing suicide, shortly after police arrived. In CNN’s coverage, however, there was almost no mention of the gunman, and I had to Google to learn that police had identified him as Andre Bing, a 31-year-old who worked as team leader on the overnight shift. Co-workers said he was a weirdo:

The Walmart gunman who opened fire in the break room of the Chesapeake store where he worked last night had a list of the names of people he wished to target.
Andre Bing, 31, opened fire in the breakroom of the Walmart in Sam’s Circuit, Chesapeake, at 10.12pm last night, where 14 employees had gathered for a pre-shift meeting.
Bing’s rampage killed six people in total, including a 16-year-old boy.
In a press release Wednesday evening, the City of Chesapeake identified five of the deceased victims as Lorenzo Gamble, Brian Pendleton, Kellie Pyle, Randall Blevins, and Tyneka Johnson.
The sixth deceased victim’s name and photo was withheld due to his age, the city said. . . .
Earlier in the day, the city identified the shooter as Bing, saying he was ‘armed with one handgun and had multiple magazines on his person.’ . . .
Bing opened fire in the breakroom at the back of the store. He shot ten people before killing himself.
When police searched his body, they found a list of names that contained the names of the colleagues he wished to target, according to local Virginia outlet WAVY, citing an anonymous source. . . .
Former colleagues today described Bing as ‘weird’ and revealed he was so paranoid about being watched by the government that he taped over the camera on his phone. . . .
‘Everyone called him weird. That was all anyone could say about Andre,’ Shaundrayia Reese, who previously worked with him, told The New York Times.
She added that he had a ‘nasty attitude’ – something other staff also complained about.
‘He had an attitude. He was kind of aggressive.
‘There were moments where he was OK, but he was definitely hard to work with and a little hostile,’ Nathan Sinclair, who also used to work with him, said.

None of this was mentioned on CNN, which de-emphasized the killer and instead ran with a chyron, “GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA,” but actually had Stephen Gutoski on their panel, surrounded by liberals advocating gun control. But what law could have prevented this shooting? The gunman used a common sort of pistol, not some exotic “assault rifle.” While it’s not known how he acquired the weapon, there’s no indication that he got it illegally, or that “background checks” should have prevented him from purchasing firearms. The White House issued a presidential statement: “This year, I signed the most significant gun reform in a generation, but that is not nearly enough. We must take greater action.” Well, so what? In what way would this “gun reform” have prevented the Walmart shooting? If “greater action” is needed, please tell us exactly what you have in mind, and how it’s related to what happened in this case. Which, of course, they won’t and can’t, because Democrats won’t be satisfied until Americans are completely disarmed, but they can’t say that out loud and still win elections. Meanwhile, however, this story presents yet another Case of the Disappearing Perpetrator.

If the shooter had been a white guy, especially some sort of right-wing type, the perp’s mug shot would have been featured at the top of the hour, every hour, on CNN, but instead Andre Bing is barely mentioned (and his photo never shown) in CNN’s coverage. This is your big “tell” that what they’re doing is not exactly news, but rather political propaganda on behalf of the Democratic Party. The obvious reason CNN jumped on the Virginia Walmart shooting initially was that the producers must have thought: “The South! Surely this shooter must be a redneck Bubba!”

Unfortunately for their agenda, wrong again.

They’re 0-for-2 this week on mass shootings. When a gunman stormed into a Colorado Springs gay bar and opened fire, killing five people, the media immediately leapt to the conclusion: “Hate crime!” And immediately seized on the idea that “transphobic rhetoric” by Republicans must somehow be to blame, since the club in question had hosted drag queen performances. In a New York Times column, Michelle Goldberg declared the shooting “was at once shocking and entirely predictable, like terrorist attacks on synagogues and abortion clinics.” She name-checked Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Christopher Rufo and Ben Shapiro among those to blame for the “demonization” that she presumed led to the shooting, even though her column was published before anybody actually knew anything about the gunman or his motives.

Then it turned out (a) the shooter had been in a standoff with police in June 2021, but the charges were mysteriously dropped, (b) the shooter identifies as “non-binary,” and (c) the shooter changed his name to avoid association with his estranged father, a meth-addicted former porn star.

In other words, not your typical Trump voter.

Their brains simply can’t cope with the disappointment. So the Colorado Springs shooter will disappear down the media’s memory hole, as will the Virginia Walmart shooter, because neither of them fit the Preferred Narrative of Right-Wing Violence. These gunmen lack the necessary qualifications of significance — they don’t advance the agenda — and so they’ll be forgotten, just like Bernie Sanders fanboy James Hodgkinson has been forgotten, because most self-identified “journalists” are, indeed, just Democratic Operatives With Bylines.




 

Comments

2 Responses to “Yet Another Inconvenient Mass Murder Destined for the Media’s Memory Hole”

  1. SHHHHHH, this story is going down the Memory Hole - The DaleyGator
    November 24th, 2022 @ 3:47 pm

    […] Is yesterdays’ mass shooter, who killed 6 fellow Wal Mart employees, the “Wrong” kind of shooter. The Other McCain answers his own question […]

  2. Don’t Be Little Kenny | okrahead
    November 24th, 2022 @ 11:10 pm