After the Shootings, Partisan Media Offer Dubious Comfort

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Jul 8, 2022

For example, Tucker Carlson, who has taken O’Reilly’s place as the ratings leader on prime-time cable TV, managed to blame women, “government-endorsed weed” and therapeutic drugs “handed out at every school in the country by crackpots posing as counselors.”

“And of course, they are angry,” he said, voicing a parade of pathologies that may or may not be relevant to the actual accused. “They know that their lives will not be better than their parents, they’ll be worse. ... And yet the authorities in their lives — mostly women — never stop lecturing them about their so-called privilege. ‘You’re male! You’re privileged.’ ”

Fox star Laura Ingraham picked up the weed theme and sounded like the script from “Reefer Madness” as she connected “mounting scientific evidence” to violent behavior among young people to “sustained cannabis use.”

In fact, pick your favorite social pathology — or least favorite political view — and there’s a good chance that someone will pin it on Crimo.

That happens on both political sides. As liberals labeled Crimo a right-winger on Twitter based on photos that showed him at a Donald Trump rally, tweeters on the right tried to paint him as a lefty.

Fox News host Greg Gutfeld, for example, speculated that photos showing Crimo dressed as a woman, apparently to evade police, connected him to the radical antifa movement, because “if you look at antifa, that’s how they look!”

That’s as much of a stretch as the geographic expertise of commentators who try mightily to paint the shootings as a “Chicago” problem, even though Google Maps shows Chicago to be almost 28 miles away.

As someone who lived in Chicago for many years, I didn’t need Google Maps. Nor do I need people to deflect from the real roots of troubled young people and surges in violent crimes, very serious and complex problems that are hardly limited to Chicago.

There were more mass shootings in the past five years than in any other half-decade going back to 1966, according to an analysis by The Marshall Project of data from another nonprofit, The Violence Project, which uses the same narrow definition of mass shootings as the Congressional Research Service, which advises federal lawmakers.

One-size-fits-all diagnoses, stereotypes and presumptions don’t serve us well, especially when they steer us away from the obvious: We still have too many guns getting into the wrong hands.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)