The Patriot Post® · Two School Shootings, One Media Narrative

Perhaps nothing reveals the increasingly blatant bias of the mainstream media more than their coverage — or conspicuous lack thereof — of events that either align themselves with the progressive political agenda, or run counter to it. A tale of two school shootings, one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the other at Great Mills High School in Southern Maryland, is highly indicative.

Despite a plethora of evidence to the contrary, the Parkland narrative continues to be framed as a gun control issue, and thus remains front and center. This includes the latest expletive-filled diatribe by the media-anointed anti-gun “authority,” Parkland student David Hogg. By contrast, the Great Mills narrative of a “good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy with a gun” has, by comparison, been relegated to the ash heap of history.

The Parkland atrocity occurred Feb. 14. Every day since, South Florida’s Sun-Sentinel newspaper has published either a front page story, an editorial, a steady barrage of anti-gun letters to the editor, or some combination of all three. Sunday’s paper was no exception. Both the front page and the editorial section were entirely focused on the March for Our Lives, the progressive-controlled anti-gun demonstration that took place Saturday in Washington, DC, and in other cities around the country.

This writer checked every page of the Nation & World section in the same newspaper, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Not a word about Great Mills — despite the reality it occurred on March 20, more than a month more recently than Parkland.

What has become “ancient history” with regard to Parkland? The massive failure of government at every level — including the race-based Obama administration school discipline policy that enabled the massacre. A Google search of “policies responsible for Parkland shooting” reveals the most recent story written about the colossal failures evinced by both the FBI and Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel’s department was posted March 5, by the conservative website RedState. A Feb. 23 Washington Post article mentions one of the prime players in that failure, deputy Scot Peterson.

Yet the point of the Post piece was not about the armed deputy’s cowardice but about clinical psychologist Laurence Miller’s assertion that arming teachers is “a recipe for disaster.”

NPR columnist David Desroches adds a racist angle to the progressive push-back against armed presence in schools. “Studies have shown that students do better when they feel safe, but there’s a line,” he asserts. “If a school is too secure, it can have the opposite effect. Especially for students of color.”

What about an armed police presence? Following the Newtown shooting in 2013, Chicago public school teacher Ashley Lauren Samsa derided that proposition, insisting it “will only add to a culture where guns are commonplace, making them part of every day life rather than weapons to be used only when absolutely necessary.”

Perhaps Samsa was unaware that guns in Chicago — in the hands of criminals — are already commonplace and have turned that city into a killing field, despite it having some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation.

That guns in the hands of the law-abiding are a recipe for disaster, inherently racist, or culturally deleterious goes a long way toward explaining why the heroic efforts of Great Mills High School resource officer, Blaine Gaskill, who directly confronted and ultimately killed the shooter, remain largely under-reported.

And when stories about guns saving lives are reported? CNN pointed out that “students at Great Mills High School walked out of class as part of a student-led protest against school violence in the wake of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School” and that students from the Florida school were “offering their thoughts and calling for an end to gun violence in schools.”

That would be the same CNN that apparently canceled an interview with Kyle Kashuv, a Parkland student who is pro-Second Amendment. Why? In an interview with The Daily Signal, Kashuv stated the obvious: “There’s a clear media blackout for people that don’t have the same agenda as the news organization.”

CNN’s agenda has been clear for quite some time. Its orchestrated anti-gun town hall following the Stoneman shooting was reminiscent of George Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate,” with NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio alternatively playing the part of 1984’s Emmanuel Goldstein. What is the likelihood CNN will host a similar town hall where Second Amendment supporters can air contrasting opinions?

Zero.

Several Google searches using a variety of terms centered on the media bias that accrues to the two incidents yielded a single piece by The New American, a conservative website. Columnist Bob Adelmann took the usual suspects to task, rightly explaining the incident in Maryland provides no “grist for the anti-gun media.”

He further notes The Washington Post, which assigned seven reporters to the story, framed the issue as one crediting Gaskill “with possibly saving lives by quickly engaging the shooter.” (Italics added.) Yet three paragraphs later, and exactly like CNN, the Post reminded its readers that the incident “comes days before thousands are expected in Washington for Saturday’s March for Our Lives rally, a march against gun violence and school shootings.”

The end of the piece reeks of anti-gun calculation, courtesy of the Maryland killer’s neighbor, Toni Foreman. “What’s next, world?” she asks. “What do we need to do so our kids can be safe and go to school? How many more kids have to die?”

As many as those who eschew an armed presence in schools, while maintaining a reverence for the intellectually bankrupt notion of “gun free” zones are willing to countenance, Ms. Foreman. Reflexively anti-gun people so out of touch with reality that the Blue Mountain School District in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, will be “arming” students — with buckets of river stone. “If an armed intruder attempts to gain entrance into any of our classrooms, they will face a classroom full students armed with rocks and they will be stoned,” district superintendent Dr. David Helsel warns.

Such lunacy will be aided and abetted every step of the way by a mainstream media that would rather advance a narrative than report the facts.

And there is nothing more inimical to the media’s “assault weapon” ban narrative than the inconvenient fact that the Maryland assailant used his father’s legally owned, 9mm Glock handgun to commit his crime.

What now, for that narrative — other than the American Left’s desire to ban guns outright laid bare?

On March 14, during the National School Walkout — as in the prior leftist-orchestrated, student recruitment effort — a New Prague High School student holding a sign that said, “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People,” was removed from the march by the school’s principal. According to fellow student Kenny MacDonald, the “offending” student was also threatened with arrest.

Ironically, that violation of the student’s First Amendment rights was an object lesson regarding the need for the Second Amendment. That this immutable reality is disdained by a thoroughly corrupt media who are the greatest beneficiaries of a Second Amendment that protects a First Amendment that protects them — is even more ironic.