The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

National Media Instantly Sends Philly Mass Shooter Down the Memory Hole

Posted on | July 7, 2023 | Comments Off on National Media Instantly Sends Philly Mass Shooter Down the Memory Hole

Mass murder suspect Kimbrady Carriker

Most “mass shootings” in urban America are actually shootouts between rival gangs, or personal disputes that turn into gunfights in crowded areas where bystanders are among the killed and wounded. And, since we’re clarifying phrases, let’s admit that “urban America” is a polite euphemism for where black people live. We have been taught by the news media to think of “mass shootings” as a category of crime whose perpetrators are crazy white men, e.g., Charles Whitman, who killed 15 people on the University of Texas campus in 1966, or Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed 13 people at Columbine High School in 1999.

The point is that any discussion of “mass shootings” involves stereotypes, simply because of the way the media covers crime. The Gun Violence Archive (GVA) defines a mass shooting as one that involves “a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed,” distinguishing this from the category of mass murder, which the FBI defines as “four or more victims, killed, not including the shooter. Mass Murder by gun is a subset of the Mass Shooting count.” By Thursday, July 6, according to the GVA, there had been a total of 361 mass shooting incidents in the United States in 2023, of which 27 were mass murder incidents (at least four killed, not counting the shooter). Thursday was the 186th day of the year, so simple math tells us that we’re averaging about two mass shootings per day this year, and about one mass murder per week. Given the frequency of such crimes, the national media can’t give full attention to all of them, so they tend to be selective in their coverage, and therefore most mass shootings are considered to be strictly “local news.”

What happened Monday night in Philadelphia’s Kingessing neighborhood was definitely not the typical urban mass shooting. A lone gunman, wearing a ski mask and a bulletproof vest, walked down the street “aimlessly” shooting random people with an AR-15-style rifle. The gunman also carried a 9mm pistol and multiple magazines of extra ammunition. This rampage killed five people and wounded two others. Kimbrady Carriker has been charged with five counts of murder and several other felonies. Many hours elapsed after the shooting before Carriker’s name was made public, but almost as soon as it was, we learned that Kimbrady Carriker was a cross-dresser.

The information caused a liberal media meltdown:

The Far Right Is Already
Using the Philadelphia Shooting
to Smear Trans People
— Vice News, July 5

Right-Wingers Push Lie
That Philly Shooting Suspect
Was Trans BLM Supporter
— Advocate, July 5

Republicans Are Already
Blaming Trans People
for the Philadelphia Shooting
— The New Republic, July 5

The main problem with mass shootings, according to liberals, is not that people get killed, but that the “far right” might blame someone — i.e., that conservatives will point out that this crime doesn’t seem to fit the preferred media narrative about who commits mass shootings. The other problem: What about his/her/their pronouns?

There was some confusion initially about Mr. Carriker’s gender identity and in a news conference on Tuesday, authorities used the pronouns “they/them.” But on Wednesday the district attorney’s office said it had no information indicating the suspect considered himself anything but male.

Hat-tip to Dana Pico for that one, and Dana also has the story about a Philadelphia City Council member who “described her district as ‘under siege’ by gun violence”:

“It creates a situation where mostly Black and Brown people can’t be in their neighborhood enjoying summer weather. Kids — anyone — enjoying their block should not live in fear of being shot and killed,” she said Tuesday.
Now that Democrats control the state house for the first time in 12 years following last November’s election, [Council Member Jamie] Gauthier said some movement on gun control legislation has started. However, any house bills would still face opposition in the GOP-controlled state senate.
“In Pennsylvania, you have Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in the cities and outside of that, you have a lot of rural areas that don’t look like us and don’t have the same issues with everyday gun violence — and don’t have the same motivation to really cut off access to these types of weapons,” she said. “We have a long way to go to get these kinds of weapons off the street.”

You can read the whole thing at First Street Journal, but the most important thing that Dana points out is the basic arithmetic involved:

There are 67 counties in Pennsylvania — Philadelphia (1.6 million people, about 12% of the state population), Allegheny (i.e., Pittsburgh, 1.2 million people, about 9% of the state population) and 65 others with about 10 million people total (about 78% of the state population). The two big cities account for slightly more than one-fifth of Pennsylvania’s population, but in 2021, when there were 1,027 homicides in the state, these two cities accounted for about two-thirds of the total; Philadelphia alone had nearly 55% of Pennsylvania’s homicide total that year.

The per capita homicide rate in Philadelphia was more than triple the rate in Pittsburgh, and more than 10 times higher than the rest of the state. This is not a gun control problem. This is a people problem; specifically, it’s about the people of Philadelphia who are either (a) part of the problem, or (b) too stupid to understand how to fix the problem.

If you’re voting for Democrats like Jamie Gauthier, you are the problem. Gauthier can only think of violent crime in terms of passing new laws to “get these kinds of weapons off the street,” so that it never occurs to her that, by enforcing existing laws, Philadelphia could get these kinds of people off the streets — put them in prison where they belong.

Or in the lunatic asylum, as would seem to be the case with Kimbrady Carriker, who not only occasionally dressed up in women’s clothing, but also at different times used his (or “their”) social media to express support for Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump. As I said of another notorious cross-dresser, Carriker is self-evidently “daft, deranged, bonkers, berserk, a few fries short of a Happy Meal and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.” The evidence of his craziness is impossible to overlook:

Philadelphia Shooting Perp Says
He Opened Fire to Help the City
Do Something About ‘Gun Violence’
. . . The shooter accused of killing five people during a harrowing rampage in Southwest Philadelphia Monday night told police the shooting spree was an attempt to help authorities address the city’s gun violence crisis, and that a deity would be sending more people to help, according to sources familiar with the investigation.
The assertions by Kimbrady Carriker were made to police in the hours after Carriker was arrested on the 1600 block of South Frazier Street, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation.
Carriker first told responding officers who made the arrest that they had done a good job, the sources said. Carriker also told them the gunfire — which spanned several blocks and struck people, including two children, who had no apparent connection to one another — was an attempt to help police because “all these guys are out there killing people,” the sources said.

I keep telling you: Crazy People Are Dangerous. And the national media will now decide this is strictly “local news.”



 

 

Category: Crime, Pennsylvania

Comments

Comments are closed.