This particular bit of awful news out of Fresno, California broke on Sunday evening and at first, it caused quite a stir in the media. A mass shooting had taken place in the back yard of a family home where a group of people had gathered to watch football. Multiple gunmen entered the yard through a side gate and without saying a word began firing into the crowd. When they fled there were four dead and six more injured. People were justifiably horrified. (Associated Press) ...This shooting qualified for multiple Breaking News announcements on cable news and announcements arriving in people’s email inboxes. And then a strange thing seemed to happen. By Monday morning there was almost no additional coverage. I think I saw it mentioned briefly twice on CNN, and then it was back to the impeachment hearings pretty much non-stop. With ten people shot and four killed, this obviously meets the media’s current definition of a mass shooting. So where was the outrage? Where were the calls for new gun control laws? How did this tragedy turn into a non-story? First of all, the victims were all adult males from the Hmong community. And while police said they didn’t find any ties to gang activity among the victims, they were looking into a recent “disturbance” between some of them and members of one of the local Hmong gangs...Another factor is the fact that police reported the assailants using semiautomatic handguns. The event was reportedly over pretty quickly, so they probably weren’t using collections of extended magazines. In other words, this mass shooting is uninteresting to much of the media because it fails all the normal tests and doesn’t fit in with the narrative. Had the men at least been using “assault rifles” they might have merited a bit more coverage. But those events are vanishingly rare because most gang members are well aware that it’s tough to hide a long gun when walking down the street to attack someone or while fleeing the scene afterward...MORE
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