Wednesday, May 20, 2015

The Narritive

Here we find the talking heads discussing the Waco kerfuffle and comparing it to the Baltimore riots. The cop on the show points out that the two are not remotely related.

Baltimore was a riot in a town with very strict gun laws. Almost nobody was armed and as a result neighborhoods burned. The criminals were out committing crimes, and no one was there to stop them A perfect failure of government to do the job they insist they have a monopoly concession on.

Waco was a modern day reenactment of the classic old west saloon gunfight. All the casualties seem to have been the combatants and although there may have been some collateral injuries among the bystanders, the media has yet to report any. Now there's a professor of religious studies who concludes that:
"Americans’ proven inability to handle widespread gun ownership” means “many forms of gun ownership” should be outlawed — and then the government should confiscate firearms deemed illegal.
Note carefully that only the bikers seem to have been killed. Note also that the saloon and the surrounding neighborhood are still standing, unburned. Further note that in spite of the number of arrests made, no one is threatening to burn down a nail salon in protest. Texas with its widespread gun ownership seems to have weathered the situation far better than Baltimore.

The news lady also seemed upset that when a black person gets arrested, the media always mention his race but when a white person is arrested, his race is almost never mentioned. This is perhaps because most of the population is white so when someone is arrested, the default condition is that the perp is white. Lumping Hispanics in with the whites, as frequently happens adds to the perception.

Similarly, when a pol is busted for some sort of corruption, the media standard is to list his party affiliation in the first line of the story if he's a Republican, and not at all if he's a Democrat. The default condition is for a corrupt pol to be a Democrat. It's less common, and therefore newsworthy if he happens to be a Republican.

No comments: