by Kerry Dougherty
As a long-time opinion writer I have one rule that I try to follow.
I usually wait anywhere from 24 to 48 hours after a crime has been committed to weigh in.
All too often what seems clear moments after the criminal act becomes a little more complicated once the inconvenient facts dribble out.
Anyone else remember how dumb President Barack Obama looked in 2009 when he impulsively weighed in on the Cambridge incident involving a black Harvard professor who was arrested for disorderly conduct after cops responded to a 911 call about someone breaking into his house in the middle of the night?
The president said the cops “acted stupidly.”
They didn’t act stupidly. The details were far more nuanced. Obama said he “regretted” his rush to judgment and smoothed over his knee-jerk faux pas with his now-famous “beer summit.”
There’s a lesson to learn from Obama’s mistake.
So last week, after the Atlanta shootings, I did not join the Greek chorus blaming anti-Asian prejudice for the killings. Frankly, it didn’t seem like a typical racially motivated crime because two of the victims were white. Plus, the suspect was a certifiably weird dude who said he was a sex addict and that the murders had something to do with that.
Where’s the harm in waiting before inflaming racial tensions?
Fact is, eight innocent people were slain and one crazy man is responsible. We’ll eventually learn the whole story. And the perpetrator will get justice, we hope.
Same goes for the shootings in Boulder on Monday.
In the immediate aftermath, when photos of the alleged killer of 10 were posted and the perp appeared to be white, some on the left seemed almost giddy.
That Tweet, sent less than three hours after the shootings by the niece of Vice President Kamala Harris, was later deleted. Unfortunately for her, screenshots live forever.
Then there’s this, from a reporter for Byline News with more than 264,000 followers:
The suspected gunman in the Boulder, Colorado mass shooting is a white guy. Seven reported dead!
Cue “mental issues,” “bad day,” “parking dispute,” or anything else other than what he most likely is – a white domestic terrorist. pic.twitter.com/v0ukqWtIVN
— CJ Werleman (@cjwerleman) March 22, 2021
How glib. How cute. How wrong.
By Tuesday afternoon the fools who rushed in to pronounce the alleged killer a white supremacist had whiplash. Seems the suspect is a man with an Arab-sounding name, a Syrian who came to the U.S. as child refugee with his family. He’s a naturalized citizen and, according to news reports, a Trump-hating liberal.
No, I don’t blame all Trump-hating libs for Monday’s mass supermarket killing. I blame the killer.
Nor do I blame his weapon.
Yet the only thing that happens faster than breathless, bad theories about motives are lefties screaming for gun control within seconds of any mass shooting.
They do it every time.
Never mind that criminals don’t obey laws, that most killers use handguns and no one in the media seems able to recognize an “assault” weapon.
Mass shootings are the worst sort of tragedy. They’re a scourge. The victims are often selected at random and their families are left to deal with the horror.
It’s worth remembering that the shooters are not always white and they’re often motivated by fury over a job situation, a broken marriage or they’re just insane and off their meds.
With time, we’ll learn what really happened in Boulder.
If the media doesn’t lose interest now that it seems the suspect doesn’t fit their preferred narrative.
This column is republished with permission from Kerry: Unemployed & Unedited.
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