There was another mass shooting in America on Monday, and the carnage was horrific. A total of nine people were shot, all of them were taken to nearby hospitals, and at least one person is dead: a 21-year-old college basketball player who, by all accounts, wasn’t just a terrific athlete but was also a genuinely good person.
At least one promising young life has been lost, and several other lives have been permanently changed for the worse. Devasting injuries, or at the very least the traumatic impact on the victims’ mental health, will likely linger for the rest of the victims’ lives.
But there’s been virtually no mention of this violence in the mainstream media. The leftwing broadcast networks of CBS, ABC, NBC, and PBS devoted virtually nonstop coverage to the horrific shooting in Uvalde last month but haven’t even mentioned this shooting on Monday. The leftwing legacy print media – including the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today – have either downplayed its significance or have ignored it entirely. And, of course, the far-left cable news channels of CNN and MSNBC could not be bothered with giving the story coverage.
But, why? Why has this story been so widely brushed off? The answer is simple: Because of where it happened. Monday’s mass shooting of nine people happened in New York City, first and foremost, and that’s a city run by Democrats. Furthermore, the incident happened on 139th Street in Manhattan. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with the Big Apple’s geography, that part of the city is considered Harlem, a neighborhood whose residents are almost exclusively black.
According to the New York Post:
“A college hoops star had his promising career snuffed out when he came home from school for the summer — and ended up senselessly gunned down in a mass shooting in Harlem early Monday. Darius Lee, 21, a local basketball standout, was pronounced dead at Lincoln Medical Center — as his distraught mother frantically scoured the neighborhood begging for news of her son, a local activist said.”
While we don’t know with certainty the race of the shooter(s), we can safely assume that they were black. We can make this assumption because statistics show that violent crimes against black victims are usually committed by other black folks. That statistic holds true with other races as well, incidentally, where violent crimes are generally committed against and by people of the same race. We can also draw this conclusion because if the police suspected the shooters were white, this story would have been the top story on the news for days on end.
Has President Joe Biden commented on this senseless tragedy? What about Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer who continue to holler about gun control at every opportunity? What about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), both of whom represent constituents in New York City, and neither of whom seems capable of shutting up regarding the topic of ‘Black Lives Matter.’
The fact is this: Democrats and their media care about, and report on, mass shootings when the circumstances of such violence fit their narrative. First and foremost, black folks shooting other black folks doesn’t align with the left’s storyline that white supremacists are the major threat to Americans. But we also have the issue of New York being a deep blue city with Democrats controlling all branches of government, and some of the strictest gun laws in the country.
Mass shootings are only worth covering and discussing if white folks do the shooting (i.e. the Buffalo shooting last month) or if it occurs in a red state (i.e. the Uvalde shooting only a few weeks later). Democrats and their media cronies can’t acknowledge black-on-black crime because that’s supposed to be a myth.
Democrats can’t admit that cities like New York and Chicago with their oppressive gun laws have a problem with gun violence because the gun control for which they advocate is supposed to solve those problems. And neighborhoods such as Harlem, where advocates push to ‘defund the police’ and then move out to safer neighborhoods to avoid the violence, are supposed to be peaceful and harmonious.
Indeed, mass shootings are a problem only if certain boxes are checked off. People dying from gunshots are only worth discussing if it happens in red states. And black lives matter, but only when we’re talking about the threats in the context of police brutality. Democrats and their media are remarkably hypocritical, and Monday’s shooting in Harlem is just one more example.
Jess Lawson writes at The Blue State Conservative
