The NRA is amping up its distraction campaign after the latest mass school shooting.
Their line: The NRA isn’t the bad guy for helping make assault-style weapons easily attainable by angry young men bent on destruction and murder — the news media is to blame for telling you about it.
“Many in legacy media love mass shootings. You guys love it,” NRA flak Dana Loesch said Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, days after a gunman killed 17 students, staff, faculty and coaches at a Florida high school. “Now I’m not saying that you love the tragedy. But I am saying that you love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold to you and many in the legacy media in the back (of the room).”
And NRA TV put out a video featuring gun activist Colion Noir, also on Thursday: “No one on this planet benefits more from mass shootings and motivates more people to become mass shooters than our mainstream media.”
Life would be so much easier for the NRA if we simply let schoolchildren be mowed down in obscurity.
The NRA could point out that gun manufacturers have financially benefited from mass shootings with increased sales after murder sprees, at least until now. It’s clear that Congress won’t do anything to significantly change gun laws, so the post-massacre consumer rush has subsided a bit.
So here we are, with the NRA’s organizational leadership trying to cast “the media” in the villain role, for showing victims of gun violence, for talking to crying mothers and friends of murdered children, for raising the obvious point: Something is deeply wrong in America, and firearms are part of that equation.
The risk to the NRA, of course, is that some might see the aftermath of these massacres and decide that, just maybe, the high-volume killing machines used to carry out these murders are part of the problem.
We in the media are used to blanket criticism, to being lumped into some giant malevolent monolith with all of us being judged by the actions of the worst of us. Maybe that’s how some NRA members feel.
I’m never quite sure who is included in “The Media,” or “Mainstream Media” or “Legacy Media,” but when it’s used pejoratively by the Right Wing it means anyone who publishes information they don’t like. (The tag never seems to include Fox News, which has been around since 1996 and has been the most-watched cable news network for the past 16 years running — but that’s somehow not “mainstream.”)
I’d like to tell you something about “The Media,” at least as I know it from covering Tucson and Arizona for more than 20 years.
We’re people like you. We’re your neighbors.
And we most certainly do not “love mass shootings.” Criticizing journalists for covering a mass shooting is, in a way, like saying the police love violent crime because it keeps them employed.
In each of Tucson’s mass shootings — in October 2002 when a failing UA nursing student shot and killed three professors and himself, and on Jan. 8, 2011, when a young man shot and killed six people and injured 13 more, including Gabby Giffords — people in our newsroom were personally affected by the horrific violence.
Many of us at the Star knew people who were killed or witnessed the carnage. They were our friends, family members and people we knew from covering news in Tucson. These weren’t some kind of abstract “news events,” in which we cheered the increased newspaper sales that followed. We felt deep sorrow, as you did.
The same is true for local journalists covering mass shootings in their own communities, whether in Florida, Colorado, Las Vegas, Orlando — and wherever the next killing spree happens.
We at the Star, and in “The Media” across our country, send our kids to school, same as you, hoping that they’ll be safe.
We shop for groceries, same as you, at the supermarket that was once a crime scene.
We go to concerts, softball practice or worship, same as you, with the knowledge that no place is entirely safe.
But we also know that pretending mass shootings don’t happen won’t make them stop.
