Does The Texas Shooting Count?
Another school shooting took place. What a strange and twisted world we live in, ain’t it?
On Friday, May 18th, 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis, an unassuming honor roll student, defense tackle football player, opened fire at Santa Fe High School, TX, killing 10 and wounding another 10.
I only heard about the shooting that Friday at 4pm. Another tragic event caused by another deranged individual. I am heartbroken about the ones who died in this shooting and I am saddened about the pain and suffering their families are experiencing.
I am sadder about something else though. The first question I asked myself, the minute I read about the shooting, was: “What gun was used to commit this crime?”
My initial focus was not on if anyone had died. Not on if there were survivors. Not on the families, not on the individuals, not on sadness, suffering, or pain. Don’t get me wrong, I did eventually think about all these emotions, but I wondered why I didn’t think of these things, first.
With that in mind I questioned my own thinking. Why did I feel this way? The best answer I can muster is that I am tired of the reoccurring antigun rhetoric that arises every time someone shoots up a school, or any other place for that matter. Their narrative revolves around “let’s ban this”, “let’s ban that”, “let’s ban bumper stocks”, “let’s ban AR-15s”. The focus is directed at an agenda, instead of people.
Mr. Pagourtzis used a .38 caliber revolver and a shotgun as his weapons of choice.
It could be my own perception, but I believe that this type of news spread like wild fire. Seeing that the shooting happened at 7:30am on that Friday, I wondered why I didn’t hear anything until the end of the day. No one uttered the customary “did you hear about the…?”
I am fine with these events not being over publicized. The media coverage of these shootings certainly gives the shooters their 15 minutes of infamy, transforming them into infamous celebrities of sorts. I wonder how many of these criminals watched the latest ‘week-long’ coverage of another school shooting in the media and thought: “gee, it seems easy to shoot up a school”.
I imagine we can agree that normally, the media coverage of these events linger on the ‘air’ for extended periods of time. Maybe that’s only me, but I confess that I felt that this shooting was, actually, under publicized.
On the following morning (Saturday, May 19th – between 7:55am and 8:17am MST), I decided to peruse the intrawebs to learn more about the shooting. What I found was weird and odd. At first glance, there wasn’t much information about the shooting. I’m not saying that the information wasn’t there. It was, but the data about the shooting wasn’t obvious and evident as these events normally are. It seemed that all the media’s headlines; all it could talk about was, you may have guessed it, the royal wedding.
As I came to this realization I started to take screenshots of some of the major news outlets. Please note the yellow boarder. That represents all that is visible when the web pages open without any scrolling. See for yourself:
Here I had to click on the right arrow 16 times or click on the left arrow 4 times in order for me to read anything about the shooting in Texas.
Nearly four months after the Stoneman Douglas High School (Parkland, FL) shooting took place, we’re still talking about it. Three days ago, NBC televised an interview with the former Florida Sheriff’s deputy (now retired), Scot Peterson, who was the armed resource office/sheriff’s deputy on duty that day. Two days ago, a video recorded by the Parkland, FL shooter was released. Just yesterday, the New York Times, released an article titled: “Are We Going to Die Today? Inside a Parkland Classroom as Bullets Flew.”
Why are we still talking about the Parkland shooting but not the Texas shooting? Why am I not hearing the same outcry from the antigun lobby about the Texas shooting? Don’t these lives matter just as much? Are there school walk-outs planned for the next little while? Where are Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg?
Does this school shooting even count because the shooting weapon was not an evil AR-15?