The Laramee Filter: pseudorandom thoughts, subsequently put on the Internet.
 
Author:
Tom Laramee
Date Published:
May 15th, 2022
Word Count:
682 (5:00 read time)
Filed Under:

May I Please Get Off of the Mass Shooting Media Roller Coaster Now?

I'd like to get off of the mass shooting media roller coaster now please. It's the same story every single time, so there's no need to keep telling it.

I can save everyone a lot of time and just tell you what's going to happen:

  1. Alex Jones calls it a "false flag". This MO had already been spreading prior to the shooting, and so the conspiracy theory that "it was a false flag operation" begins to pop up with more regularity across multiple new sites.
  2. OAN/Newsmax say the shooter was a socialist.
  3. Huffpost/CNN/MSNBC/etc say it was a right-wing white nationalist.
  4. Fox News never even runs the story. They instead run (a) a story about how migrants are being imported to replace white people (aka: "replacement theory") and (b) how Biden is shipping pallets of infant formula to the border to feed migrant babies instead of attending to native born babies.
  5. Tucker Carlson runs some totally out-of-left-field culture-war-type story about how "Starbucks is running with red cups this holiday season" (aka: "the war on Christmas") or how trans men are fellating one another inside of female bathrooms.
  6. The NRA comes out with a statement something like "Guns don't kill people, people kill people".
  7. A bunch of 2A enthusiasts say something like "It [gun control] is a slippery slope. Enact even a single reform and all of a sudden Obama is knocking at your door saying `hand over your store of AR-15s, as per order of the federal government`".
  8. Gun sales will go up.
  9. The huge number of people personally affected by the deaths are forever traumatized. They lost friends, spouses, and children. They'll largely be ignored by the national media, relegated to very local news sources.
  10. Alex Jones will late change his lede to "It never happened at all. Nobody died. It's a totally fictitious narrative created by the liberal media".
  11. Ted Nugent, Kid Rock, et al call for violence against liberals in response to the shooter being identified as a white nationalist.
  12. A bunch of people blame video games, specifically, first-person shooter-type games.
  13. Laura Ingraham personally blames Joe Biden. The lede will be something like "Welcome To Joe Biden's America"
  14. Should the story make it into the conservative media, said media spends the next few days blaming both liberal media and progressive culture for the shooting. There is much mention over "liberal cities overrun by crime and violence" and the "mismanagement of democrat-run cities". This will happen over long pans of homeless encampments and stock video of looters that has nothing to do with the story being broadcast.
  15. The 2A enthusiasts reiterate, in response to if we could line up in interstate-background checks and interstate-gun-buys and close the gun-show loophole those would be a sensible first steps to discuss" their "slippery slope" claim and insist that nothing can be done.
  16. A bunch of progressive people point out that congress has forbid the CDC from studying gun violence. This won't change anything.
  17. Many will point out that the leading cause of death among children and teens is now via fire-arm related injury. This won't change anything either.
  18. It will be reasonably stated, over and over and over, that "white replacement theory" and "great replacement theory" can (and is!) employed as a form of stochastic terrorism and is a self-fulfilling prophecy towards violence against minorities. You're practically giving the shooter the green light to go out and light up brown-skinned people. This, of course, won't change anything either.
  19. Alex Jones is sued for defamation and, many years later, he loses, but the damage has long been done. He then claims "My 1A is under attack, please buy my products so you can prove you're part of this fight too!".
  20. Nothing changes.
  21. Literally nothing changes.
  22. We all wait a minute, get a little distracted by other news, then the next mass shooting happens, then we all go back to step (1).

There you have it. I just saved everyone a lot of time. Cut this post out and print a copy so you have it for the next mass shooting... think of how much time you'll save not having to read the exact same media narrative every. single. fucking. time.