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One week, three shootings, very different media coverage

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It’s been a surprisingly busy week here at Bearing Arms. Last Wednesday, we had the shooting at an Orange County bar, then the shooting in a Jacksonville Dollar General, followed by the killing of a UNC professor on campus.

It’s given us a lot to talk about, unfortunately.

What stuck out to me, though, was the media coverage itself.

There were three shootings in different parts of the nation. The way the news has covered them has varied significantly, and it’s kind of telling.

After all, much of the attention has been focused on Jacksonville and UNC. Orange County has basically been memory-holed.

I find that pretty interesting because Orange County should be garnering a lot more attention. Let’s get into some of the differences.

To be clear, I get why Jacksonville got at least some more coverage than Orange County. The racist motivations ascribed to the killer will draw a lot more attention. The media is always going to lean toward the more sensational story and while Orange County resulted in the same number of deaths but also six people wounded, the alleged killer’s motive was always going to get more clicks.

But Orange County was still a shooting where three people were killed and six were wounded, whereas Jacksonville left no wounded. It should have still gotten at least more widespread attention, even if it wasn’t racially motivated.

Further, racial motivations aren’t the only thing at play here.

UNC, for example, had a Chinese student kill a Chinese professor. I’m not an expert on racism or anything, but I’m pretty sure race didn’t play a factor in this case.

Plus, UNC is garnering a lot more attention in the media than Orange County despite this looking like a far more pedestrian kind of murder. In many ways, it’s not all that different than a lot of other homicides we see in this nation. The big difference is that it happened on a college campus.

So UNC lacks the racism angle and the death toll that one would imagine would guide the media to boost the story over Orange County.

Unless, of course, you realize there’s another factor at work here.

Orange County actually works against the anti-gun narrative, hence it doesn’t get the attention.

Jacksonville involved a racist and an AR-15. Those two factors alone make it so the media will devote a lot of attention to the incident because they’re really big on the whole “everything is white supremacy” thing and very anti-AR-15.

UNC happened on a college campus in a state that finally started loosening its gun laws. They don’t have campus carry there, but a lot of other states do. As such, this is a golden opportunity for the anti-gun media to attack the restoration of gun rights taking place in the state.

Granted, a lack of a campus carry law failed to protect the dead professor here, but that’s not relevant to the narrative, now is it?

On the flip side, Orange County actively works against the narrative, especially in light of Jacksonville.

The killer there was a retired cop, so he wouldn’t have been prohibited from owning a gun anywhere in the nation. It was in gun-controlled California, where they have gun laws the media applauded but would never fly in most of the rest of the nation. There was no “assault weapon” used.

In every way, the more bloody shooting was the one that lacked the AR-15, which undermines the claim that so-called assault weapons lead to bloodier outcomes in the case of a mass shooting, which the media has long proclaimed. They can’t give it the same attention or else people might actually start to question whether or not gun control is actually a good idea.

And this just happened in the span of a single week. That made it pretty obvious, but it’s been going on for a long, long time. Some stories get amplified while others get smothered with a pillow. It’s all about what can benefit the gun control argument the most.

Details emerge regarding Orange County bar shooting

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The mass shooting at an Orange County biker bar just happened a couple of days ago, but there will undoubtedly be a lot of questions left to be answered.

Some, however, already have.

For example, it’s now been confirmed that the killer was a retired police officer, but that’s only one of the details that’s emerged.

[The killer], who was killed in an exchange with sheriff’s deputies outside the Trabuco Canyon landmark, went to his truck after the initial shootings to get two more guns: a handgun and a shotgun, Barnes said in his description of events.

The sheriff said that all four of [his] guns were purchased legally.

Barnes listed the weapons – and when they were purchased – that Snowling brought to the scene:

—A .380 pistol, 2014; (Barnes clarified that it wasn’t known if it was purchased before or after Snowling retired.)

—A .38-caliber five-shot revolver, 1987;

—A .25-caliber pistol, 1997;

—A 12-gauge shotgun, acquired after Snowling’s retirement, in 2016.

Barnes said it wasn’t clear which two handguns [the killer] took into Cook’s Corner and which one he retrieved when he returned to his truck. He did not use the shotgun until he was at the truck, though, Barnes said.

Now, I’ve got to be honest, that’s a rather strange assortment of firearms for a mass shooter. While two of them are semi-automatic pistols, both are fairly small caliber. A five-shot revolver isn’t typical for a mass shooting at all, and while we’ve seen 12-gauge shotguns used, the killer didn’t use that one until he was at his truck, not in the bar itself.

However, it also seems clear that there’s no amount of gun control that would have stopped this shooting from happening.

For one thing, as a retired police officer, the killer would likely have been exempt from many of the laws that others have to endure.

Additionally, these guns are generally not weapons that would have been restricted.

For example, I’m not familiar with any .25-caliber pistols that hold more than 10 rounds as a general rule. While there are .380s with higher-capacity magazines available, most come with around six rounds. As such, there’s no reason to think a magazine limit would have done anything.

In fact, when you get right down to it, none of the weapons used were subject to any kind of restrictions, even in the very gun-controlled state of California.

There will be a lot of lessons to learn from this incident, though it remains to be seen if the powers that be there will look at this shooting as anything other than an excuse.

What happened is an awful tragedy, one I suspect we’ll be hearing about for a little while. It shouldn’t have happened, which we can say of all mass shootings.

Yet we all know that some in California are already considering what new restrictions they can pass in the wake of this shooting despite all their previous measures being useless.

Then again, when you’re convinced gun control works, you’re going to keep pushing it no matter how often it fails.

At least three killed in Orange County biker bar shooting

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Mass shootings can happen anywhere. We’ve long known that they can, though some pretend that the issue is a lack of gun control laws and then turn a blind eye to anything that happens in a gun-controlled area.

Let’s take Orange County, California, for a moment. California has tons of gun laws on the books, but we saw two high-profile mass shootings in just two days there earlier this year. Those who think that was some kind of anomaly are going to be disappointed, though, by what just happened.

At least three people were killed and several others were wounded in a shooting at a popular biker bar in Southern California on Wednesday night. The alleged gunman is also dead, authorities said.

The incident was reported just after 7 p.m. PT at Cook’s Corner in the Trabuco Canyo area of Orange County, according to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

Deputies responded to the scene within minutes and confronted a male suspect armed with a gun. The suspect, who authorities say may have been a retired law enforcement officer, was shot and killed.

…

Four people, including the suspect, were pronounced dead at the scene. Six others, including five with gunshot wounds, were transported to a local trauma center for treatment. Two of them were in critical condition while the rest were stable, according to the Orange County Fire Authority.

Frankly, I’m not thrilled with lumping the dead suspect with those killed, but so long as everyone knows what the deal is, I’ll move on.

Currently, there’s no official word on the motive, though a couple of anonymous sources have spoken with the LA Times:

Authorities did not provide details about the identities of the shooting victims or the gunman.

Two sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the gunman, retired from the Ventura Police Department, was targeting his estranged wife. It was unclear whether the shooter followed her to the bar before opening fire on the crowd, they said.

Who knows if that will hold up upon further investigation, but there’s no reason to believe it won’t.

But what we do know is that California has extensive gun control laws on the books. We also know that many gun control laws throughout the nation exempt law enforcement officers.

And yet, here we are, with a retired cop allegedly gunning down three people before dying himself in an act that can only be described as a mass shooting in gun-controlled California.

Of course, as we learn more about this shooting, we may well learn that the person they believe was the shooter wasn’t or that he was now a prohibited person, or who knows what all we might find out. The days immediately after something like this can be fluid.

There’s a reason some people have a 72-hour rule on mass shooting information.

While this one didn’t produce a massive body count, the truth is that Orange County isn’t where people think of when they think of such acts of violence.

Interestingly, the alleged gunman supposedly retired from Ventura, California. That’s in the same county as Thousand Oaks, where there was a mass shooting a few years back.

It may mean nothing, but it’s an interesting coincidence at a minimum.

In the meantime, we’ll be keeping an eye out for more information on this incident, but it seems pretty clear that gun control didn’t do anything to prevent it.