Last weekend in El Paso a man killed 20 people, and a man in Dayton killed 9. The selection of which individuals to kill was apparently random, except that the man in Dayton killed his sister, which seems suspicious to me. The killings in El Paso took several minutes while the ones in Dayton took less than one minute (which was how long it took the cops to get there and take the dirtbag out). Both men killed their victims with bullets, which they fired from legally obtained firearms.
Yesterday a man in Southern California went on a wild, angry rampage and killed 4 people. His selection of who to kill seems to have been entirely random, and his killing spree lasted for two hours. This man killed his victims with a knife.
Now here is my question: What is the threshold through which a mass killing must pass to become worthy of national attention, flags at half mast, and a presidential visit? Is it the number of people killed, and if so, what would that number be? Recent events indicate it would be somewhere between 4 and 9. Or, does it have to do with how long it took to perpetrate the killings? I suppose that if it takes the killer two hours to get the job done, that's too long to qualify. But what if it had taken him only one hour, or 30 minutes, or 10 minutes? It seems to me that the number of people killed and the length of time it took to kill them are both too arbitrary. If it were 8 people, would it qualify, but not if it were only 7? Why would one more death make a difference? Or, does it actually come down to the type of weapon used? When it's a gun, the outcry is to ban guns, or at least pass laws that would keep guns out of the hands of potential killers (not sure how that would work). Yet when a knife is used, there is no outcry to ban or limit the sale of knives. (According to the FBI, 1604 people were murdered in the US in 2016 with a knife or other cutting instrument.)
Maybe to qualify the killer must have some sort of political motivation; yet when James Hodgkinson opened fire on a group of Republican congressmen, there was no outcry. His political motivation was clear, whereas the motives in El Paso and Dayton are vague at best. Their online ramblings seem to indicate they were both of a Leftist persuasion. The guy in California seems to have just been angry-about what we don't yet know. He was also Hispanic as were all his victims. For some reason the crime becomes more egregious when the killer is a white guy and at least some of his victims are people of color.
This past weekend also registered the 200th murder in Baltimore this year. These have mostly been blacks killing blacks, which explains why there has been no outcry that something be done. Yet why are 200 murders over a period of 7 months any less a mass slaying worthy of national attention than 9 murders in one minute? Could it be because genocide of the black community is part and parcel of the Leftist agenda, as Planned Parenthood demonstrates on a daily basis? Just asking.
I say all this to in order to bore down to the real issue. The outcry we have heard over the past few days has had nothing to do with the number of people killed or how long it took to kill them or what weapon was used to perpetrate the evil deed or what the killers motivations were. It has to do with one thing and one thing only: pointing a disingenuous finger at President Donald J. Trump!
