House Majority Whip shot at congressional baseball field

[Dill]

(06-15-2017, 12:40 PM)michaelsean Wrote: Of course they wouldn't blame anyone, he was on "their side".  Rest assured that roles would be reversed were it a Trump supporter.  It goes as far back as Bill Clinton blaming talk radio for Timothy McVeigh.  It happened in the Aurora shooting when some newsguy found a person with the same name on facebook who was a TEA Party member.  Went right to camera with it.

If a Trump supporter had shot a group of Democrats, we would see what we see now--news commentators noting the political connection and deploring the highly partisan rhetoric which supposedly incites violence, and people all over social media would be reminding us how Trump encouraged supporters to mistreat dissenters at his rallies.  And until a shooter's sanity is ruled out, these are understandable responses no matter which "side" a shooter seems to take.

Unlike the Aurora shooter, McVeigh was not mentally incompetent. And his belief that big government run by Jews was biased against whites in favor of blacks and planning to confiscate guns, and that the right spark would set off a revolution of white gun owners, can in fact be traced to media sources which are certainly NOT Hollywood and the mainstream media. This ideology was not born with McVeigh and it did not die with him. And it was certainly his motivation, as it was Dylan Roof's when he killed nine black citizens of South Carolina.


Whenever there is a shooting, various media sources attempt to provide clarifying background, some more carefully than others. For a week after Gifford was shot there was some speculation that her shooter may have been motivated by ideology, but as more info came out, it was clear that he, like the Aurora shooter, was mentally unstable. Sometimes its hard to tell, as with the last abortion clinic murders in Colorado. Within three days to a week, though, the matter is usually settled. If insanity is the verdict, the MSM do not then go on "blaming Republicans" or whomever for what a mentally disturbed person does. The fact that the recent shooter was a Bernie supporter has not been scrubbed from the news, though it will recede if it becomes clear he was mentally unstable, as presently looks to be the case.

There are times when political ideology is part of the story which explains a killer's motivation, and times when it is not. In this most recent case, new information is still coming in. If one starts with the assumption the MSM will somehow treat this case differently because the shooter was a Bernie supporter one will likely find one's bias confirmed; better to look at and compare various news sources to get the full picture available without first presuming what one will find.