From the Washington Post news section:
A mass shooting on Thursday at a Kroger supermarket in Collierville, at least the third to happen at a grocery store in recent months, killed one person and wounded more than a dozen. The gunman, identified by police as UK Thang, committed suicide. It comes amid an already terrible year for gun violence nationwide.
A Washington Post analysis of data from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research organization, found that gunfire killed more than 8,100 people in the United States in the first five months of this year, about 54 lives lost per day — a rate higher than the average toll during the same period of the previous six years. The number of gunfire deaths has increased in suburban and rural areas, though the overall numbers are lower because of smaller populations.
Gun violence experts took note of the muted response to the Tennessee attack: The nation relatively ignored a shooting at a grocery store that had the potential to be far worse than it already was. In the case of the Atlanta-area spa shootings and the grocery store attack in Boulder, Colo., this year, lawmakers, advocates and the media sprung into action, writing hundreds of stories, introducing new legislation and reigniting public debate over gun laws.
The Kroger shooting aftermath has had very little of that.
“It felt like this one barely happened or registered for many,” said Jillian Peterson, co-founder of the Violence Project, a research center that studies gun violence. “The fact that this is so routine that it’s not even a major headline, and we don’t even blink an eye when this keeps happening, is heartbreaking.”
Hmmmhmmmhmm … what could be the reasons for the lack of media attention to UK Thang’s mass shooting?
- Because, while UK Thang shot 15 people, he only murdered one. If the media were to go into hyperdrive over every one dead/many wounded mass shootings, it would be full of black unwanted party guest incidents each weekend.
- The press went insane over the white guy in the Atlanta spa shooting killing 6 Asians (as well as two miscellaneous) at a time when it was trying to blame the upsurge in black-on-Asian violence on Trump saying the words “China Flu” a year before. The Boulder shooter initially was thought to be another white man before it turned out he was named Ahmad Al Aliwi Al-Issa, at which point the press lost interest.
- The Collierville shooter was a refugee from Burma named UK Thang. ‘Nuf said.
