Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
With the boogeyman of fake news still haunting my mind, yesterday I greeted reports of an “active shooter” at the Ohio State University campus in Columbus, about 20 miles south of where I sit now, with guarded skepticism. That skepticism remained as friends of mine checked in as “safe” on Facebook; and was ultimately rewarded when we all learned that the entire “active shooter” scenario turned out to be an utterly fake narrative reported by the mainstream media – America’s undisputed champion of reporting fake news.
Not to let the opportunity to have one fake news story snowball into another slip away, Yahoo News took the occasion to publish a brief primer on Ohio’s gun laws.
“Ohio is one of the most gun-friendly states in the country, with both concealed and open carry permitted under state law; however, restrictions apply to colleges and universities. On campus grounds, concealed handguns are not permitted even with a license, unless the gun is locked inside a vehicle on campus, Open carry on school grounds, is therefore, also not permitted,” Caitlin Dixon wrote, after revealing that there was no active shooter at OSU; rather a Muslim student ran his car into a bunch of pedestrians and then set about stabbing people with a butcher knife before being shot dead after injuring eleven people.
Well, actually, Yahoo didn’t reveal the fact the student was Muslim in that article. That came later after it was realized the suspect, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, had been featured in a print-only special feature of The Lantern, the campus newspaper, called “Humans of Ohio State,” in which he bellyached about the problem of being Muslim in the Midwest.
“’I wanted to pray in the open, but I was scared with everything going on in the media. I’m a Muslim, it’s not what the media portrays me to be. If people look at me, a Muslim praying, I don’t know what they’re going to think, what’s going to happen. But, I don’t blame them. It’s the media that put that picture in their heads so they’re just going to have it and it, it’s going to make them feel uncomfortable. I was kind of scared right now. But I just did it. I relied on God. I went over to the corner and just prayed,’” Ali Artan was quoted as saying in The Lantern, according to the paper.
The irony here is near-palpable.
The media doesn’t stoke anti-Muslim fears, those are stoked when Muslims attempt, or succeed at, committing mass-murder. What the media does attempt to stoke irrational fears about, however, is firearm ownership, which is why this attempted-vehicular-homicide-turned-stabbing-attack was initially reported as an “active shooter event.” That the only gun involved was used to stop the attack and save lives doesn’t fit the MSM’s narrative, which is why one can still find “news stories” that are “related” to this incident that talk more about gun laws than the event itself.
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Free meme! Yet another life lesson brought to us by The Walking Dead.
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