How The Media Responded To Great Mills High School Shooting

The shooting at Great Mills High School on Tuesday won’t last long in the news cycle. There are a lot of reasons for that, up to and including the fact that there are currently no fatalities besides the shooter.

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However, the media’s response to the attack has been telling–at least, when there was a response.

You see, while all the major outlets covered it, it was barely a blip on the radar. CNN, for example, seemed preoccupied with porn stars and President Trump. Who cares that a kid tried to kill his classmates or anything?

MSNBC, however, took a different tact. It seems the gun the shooter used was the topic of conversation there.

MSNBC host Chris Jansing and her guests focused their coverage of the Maryland high school shooting Tuesday on the shooter’s handgun in contrast to the Florida high school shooter’s AR-15 while discussing the school resource officer’s heroics in stopping the would-be killer.

Authorities say [the shooter] shot and injured two classmates at Great Mills High School in Maryland before school resource officer Blaine Gaskill responded to the scene and killed Rollins.

“[The shooter] had a handgun. He didn’t have, as you said, a semiautomatic weapon,” Jansing said. “He didn’t have a weapon that was designed essentially for war and you had a resource officer, which is again a rare thing, who is a SWAT team member.”

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In other words, they tried to downplay the effectiveness of the school resource officer (SRO) in ending the threat.

However, what they can’t escape is that the SRO actually did his job and engaged the threat, thus ending the threat. That should have happened in Parkland. Once again, a good guy with a gun ended the encounter.

Further, I hate to break it to Jansing, but most handguns these days are semiautomatic weapons. In fact, the shooter reportedly used a Glock. So, unless Glock started offering a revolver I missed, he did use a semiautomatic weapon.

But that’s not what he meant, and that’s kind of the point some of us have been making for a while. The people trying to run the conversation on guns are clueless when it comes to guns.

That wasn’t the only hot take, however.

Over at ThinkProgress, writer Aaron Rupar penned a post titled, “Before facts are in, NRA exploits the deadly Great Mills High School shooting.” I’m sorry, but that’s rich considering the near constant politicization of tragedies before the facts are in from the anti-gunners. Remeber everyone being ready to crucify the NRA following Las Vegas despite not knowing if the weapon was even legal or not?

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The problem was the NRA dared to say anything. As per usual, the NRA isn’t allowed to say anything that might be a defense for its pro-gun position in the aftermath of an attack. They applaud the officer and criticize the lack of coverage and it’s an outrage. The fact is, despite Rupar’s claims, they were right. The media essentially ignored it and an SRO–read good guy with a gun–ended the threat.

Of course, this isn’t overly surprising. The media isn’t about simply reporting the facts. They’re propaganda machines and little more.

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