‘The Press’ has a very selective memory.
These days you can’t turn on MSNBC without hearing another heavily made up talking head bloviating about America’s culture of violence. Michael Moore got famous by exploiting and lying about the Columbine Massacre.
The talking points are already set. Americans have too many guns. And our culture of guns leads to shooting sprees. But the facts are different.
Of the 5 worst shooting rampages, only one happened in America, and none were carried out by Americans.
The worst shooting rampage was carried out by Anders Breivik in a country with some of the toughest gun control laws in the world.
The second worst was carried out by a South Korean police officer who killed 57 people. A South Korean was also responsible for the Virginia Tech Massacre, the fifth worst on the list.
The third worst university shooting in the United States was also carried out by a South Korean, One L. Goh, making South Koreans responsible for the two deadliest university shootings… in the United States. And that’s without mentioning the Su Jung Health Sauna shooting in Atlanta which killed 5 people.
There isn’t anyone talking about a South Korean culture of violence because that would be silly. And talk of America’s culture of violence is equally silly when Americans don’t even show up on the list of the 5 deadliest shooting rampages.
Of the 5 worst massacres, two were carried out by Asians and one by an African constable. Only two were carried out by white men. The next man on the list was Latino. None were carried out by Americans.
Two of the killers, William Unek in the Belgian Congo and Woo Bum-Kon of South Korea were police officers.
The deadliest shootings have occurred in Japan, in Colombia, in the Belgian Congo, in South Korea, Norway and in Australia, along with the United States. The only thing that all the shooters had in common was mental illness. In many cases there had been early warning signs. Martin Bryant in Australia had even told his psychiatrist that he wanted to go around shooting people. And then he did.
Of the worst shooting massacres in the United States in the last ten years, besides conventional lunatics like James Holmes, the Batman killer, and Adam Lanza, we have Jiverly Wong, a Vietnamese Chinese immigrant who killed 10 people at an immigration center, and Nidal Hasan, an Islamic terrorist who carried out the Fort Hood Massacre, who killed 13 people.
Of the 5 major Americans shootings in the last 5 years, only 3 were carried out by Americans and only 2 were carried out by white men. None of those white men fit the “profile” of the so-called American gun culture. Both were troubled and mentally ill loners.
The issue has never been the traditional American gun owner. And no matter how much MSNBC rants, it still isn’t.