It looks like we're going to just pretend the Kalamazoo shootings never happened.
[T]he Sunday morning talk shows all passed on the Kalamazoo story and the topic of gun violence in America. On ABC's This Week, CBS's Face The Nation, CNN's State of the Union, Fox News Sunday, and NBC's Meet The Press, not a single reference was made to the Michigan shooting spree, according to Nexis.
That's five hours of programming from shows that ostensibly address the week's most pressing issues in America, and yet no discussion of the country's latest killing spree, or what public officials should do to address the problem of gun violence.
So once again, we come face-to-face with the rather startling contrast between what counts as terrorism in America versus what counts as everyday life, of no particular consequence to the political class. And, as always, the division is whether a White Guy Did It.
If a Muslim man drove around a major American city randomly shooting people, killing six of them, it would be a major news event. It would be terrorism. It would be the talk of every Sunday show, and a talking point in the next presidential debates, and moderators would interrogate politicians on what they intended to do to keep us safe. It would be called, with justification, a Paris-style attack. It would be used as evidence of which large swaths of people could not be trusted, and which should be sanctioned against, and which should be barred from the nation in general.
If, however, six Americans are murdered in an everyday expression of American Gun Culture, it barely rates mention.
Why is that, exactly?