The college mass murder being all but ignored

AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

The UVA shooting is making a lot of headlines right about now. The shooting already has its own Wikipedia page and is a major topic of discussion in political circles. Some are calling for gun control and other legislative efforts to try and prevent this from happening again.

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I get it.

But it’s always funny to me how mass murder is apparently only bad because of the gun.

Oh, people may say otherwise, but the UVA murders are getting a buttload of attention, but another mass murder from the same day isn’t.

New details have emerged in the mysterious slaying of four college students in Idaho over the weekend.

Police in Moscow, Idaho, said they received a call just before noon on Sunday about an unconscious person in a King Road residence just south of the campus of the University of Idaho. When police arrived, they found the bodies of four dead students. Those students have now been identified: Madison Mogen, 21, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; Kaylee GonCalves, 21, of Rathdrum, Idaho; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Ethan Chapin, 20.

So why isn’t this getting the same kind of attention? Four people brutally murdered? That’s the kind of thing that will cause nightmares in responding officers years from now.

Clearly, this is big news. Why isn’t it getting the same attention as UVA?

Well, I have a theory.

Regardless of where the students were from, all of them were brutally attacked with an “edged weapon such as a knife,” police said in a press release on Tuesday. Though a murder weapon has not yet been recovered, police said that stab wounds on the victims indicate that such a weapon was used in the attack, which likely occurred early Sunday morning, perhaps around 3 or 4 a.m.

You see, because the weapon used was a knife, it seems this murder just isn’t as big of a deal for most folks. It’s a horrifying story, but a local one, not a national news item with political implications.

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We’re not seeing leaders demand knife control. We’re not hearing the anti-knife crusaders talking about how if we had just one more law, we could have prevented these horrific murders.

None of that.

Because there’s no opportunity to advance a hoplophobic agenda, there’s no reason for the media to turn these senseless murders into a political issue. It’s a crime; a horrific crime, but still just a crime.

So, we don’t get the wall-to-wall coverage. We don’t get political creatures spouting off on just how we could prevent these kinds of things. There’s no reference to our knife crime rate in relation to that of European nations, though ours is much higher. None of that.

These four kids were murdered so brutally that I don’t even want to think about what they must have gone through. Four innocent lives were snuffed out by a man with a knife, and our media all but ignores it so they can advance another mass murder story and push their narrative even further.

Yet these Idaho murders also show that evil people will kill no matter what. Banning a gun won’t make the evil go away.

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