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If an NRA spokesman has his way,
there will be a press gag on calling a
shooter a shooter
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The NRA can’t control the fact that, with unrelenting regularity in this country, somebody who thinks he has a grievance picks up a gun and blows away innocent women, men and children. So the NRA is trying to do the next best thing.
They want to make sure you don’t know that the shooter was a shooter. Maybe he slaughtered all those elementary school children…or wiped out a bunch of kids on or near a college campus…or offed a guy in a neighboring movie seat and put a bullet hole through the man’s wife’s hand…with a series of deft karate chops.
In a video on an NRA website, the, uh, commentator Dom Raso complains that those ‘biased” news media keep referring to people who shoot other people with firearms as “shooters.” Think how outrageous that is! Imagine calling a spade a spade! That, he says, is propaganda.
You don’t believe me? Go watch this person yourself.
He claims that calling a shooter a shooter exposes the “inaccuracy” of the media. Innacurate? How? Well, he says, calling them “shooters” makes us think of the “tool” they used rather than the nature of their crime, which was murder. “Evil is the problem. The tool is irrelevant,” he declares
Y’see, shooting somebody dead is just incidental. The “inaccurate” press ought to call those tool-wielding folks “murders,” he insists.
Well, then, if we can’t refer to the murderers’ tools, we’ll have to start rewriting history. Because, really, if a gun-wielding thug’s weaponry is subject to a cloak of anonymity, the same should apply to any murderer’s methods.
So the Boston Strangler? Sorry folks. He’s now “The Boston Murderer.”
“Jack the Ripper?” I’m afraid that gets a bit to graphic about what he did to women’s bodies with his knife, taking our minds away from the crime. So he’s “Jack the Murderer,” from now on, too.
Lizzie Borden, who took an axe and gave her mother 40 whacks? Sorry, she’s no longer the “Axe murderer, Lizzie Borden.” She’s now merely the garden-variety “Lizzie the Murderer.”
The accused marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev? He's now demoted to an accused marathon murderer.
What’s really getting murdered in Raso’s commentary is common sense.
