There’s a racial angle to Monday night’s senseless and horrific slaughter of three Michigan State University students and the grave wounding of five others in East Lansing, but it’s not the racial angle you might think.

The murderer, an obviously deranged and fallen 43-year-old man, happened to be black. But that detail seems purely incidental. So far as we know, this crime wasn’t driven by racial animus. Indeed, one of the three deceased students was a beautiful young black woman.

What wasn’t incidental, though, was the deliberate decision on Monday night made by multiple local news networks to refuse to disclose the crucial identifying detail of the assailant’s race while he was still at large and still a threat. We know this because we watched these events unfold on local television. We have friends and neighbors whose kids are students at MSU.

This was unconscionable, this political correctness, and it could’ve cost additional lives.

As Townhall’s Julio Rosas notes, national news anchors were guilty of the same reckless wokeness: “CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota was on the air when news was breaking about the shooting at Michigan State University Monday evening, she provided details about the suspect after police released information about him but she left out the man police were actively looking for was black.”

Is it too much to ask that when a killer is on the loose, our mainstream media provides us with as much potentially life-saving information as it can, hard-left racial sensitivities be damned?

“It was shortly after we released [the images] that he was recognized by an alert citizen,” said MSU Police and Public Safety Deputy Chief Chris Rozman. “And that was exactly what we were trying to achieve by releasing that picture, was to generate immediate tips for this person that was mobile, that we had no idea where he was at that point.”

Sadly, college campuses are notoriously soft targets for such crimes. That’s because they tend to be gun-free zones. The murderer no doubt passed plenty of crowded stores and bars and restaurants on his way to MSU. It’s a sad reality to contemplate, but if there had been just one Eli Dicken there at Markey Hall on Monday night, the devastation wrought by this bad guy with a gun could’ve been limited or denied altogether. Dicken, you may recall, was the hero of Greenwood Park Mall, the young man who saved countless lives last year when he engaged and stopped a shooter just 15 seconds after he emerged from a mall bathroom with a gun.

Said Greenwood Police Chief James Ison of Dicken: “His actions were nothing short of heroic. He engaged the gunman from quite a distance with a handgun. He was very proficient in that, tactically sound, and as he moved to close in on the suspect, he was also motioning for people to exit behind him. He has, to our knowledge — he has no police training and no military background.”

Good guy with a gun.

As for this particular assailant, the Detroit News reports that he had “a history of mental health issues and was charged with multiple gun-related crimes in 2019.”

The felony charge for carrying a firearm without a permit can carry a five-year prison sentence. But thanks to a Soros-style soft-on-crime Ingham County district attorney, Democrat Carol Siemon, the assailant instead pleaded guilty to a lesser misdemeanor charge, and prosecutors dismissed the felony charge. He was thus sentenced to 12 months’ probation in 2019 and an additional six months being added the following year.

Despite these failures to enforce the laws currently on the books — laws that in this case would’ve prevented the assailant from legally purchasing the two firearms he used — the shamelessly opportunistic gun-grabbers, like Joe Biden, are renewing their calls for tougher gun laws and a ban on “assault weapons” (whatever those are), even though the overwhelming majority of gun crimes are committed with handguns.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Updated to reflect the fact that the shooter had two legally purchased firearms in his possession, not one.