Media and Politicians are 'White-Washing' Mass Shootings - #2A
If We Classified Drive‑By Shootings as Mass Shootings, Guess Who’d Be Leading?
If We Classified Drive‑By Shootings as Mass Shootings, Guess Who’d Be Leading?
We’ve been sold a cartoon of gun violence: white shooters, white victims, white suburbs, and an obsessive focus on school tragedies unless the shooter is trans. The data tells another story entirely. When you count every shooting by the same rule, the so‑called “mass shooting epidemic” looks nothing like what politicians, the media, and bureaucrats want you to believe.
Every year, Americans are told that the nation is drowning in mass shootings. Yet the crisis on television looks nothing like the crisis in police reports. The images we see: pale faces, suburban schools, candlelight vigils, all come from an edited reality in which the victims who fit America’s newsrooms narrative count, and the victims who don’t are filed under “gang violence.” If we used the government’s own numeric threshold, four or more people shot, but removed the political asterisk that excludes drive‑bys, the geography of “mass shootings” would shift overnight from the suburbs to the inner city.
The United States sees roughly 2,000 drive‑by shootings each year, injuring or killing nearly 3,000 people. About a third wound multiple victims; five hundred separate events that would qualify as mass shootings under the same definition applied to suburban massacres. In Chicago, more people are shot in multi‑victim drive‑bys each summer than die in all the school or workplace shootings broadcast nationwide. Yet none of them appear in the mass‑shooting tallies cited by politicians, because bureaucrats quietly add a clause: “excluding gang or drug incidents.” One rule for the urban poor; another for everyone else.
This selective arithmetic produces what might be called the White narrative of…