Quelle surprise. On Saturday night, a mass shooting broke out at the Florida A&M homecoming game. Eleven people suffered gunshot wounds, with a twelfth injuring an ankle in the rush to flee the scene. Half of the victims are minors, with one just 11 years old.
Police arrested one alleged perp late yesterday and announced it this morning. They took a 15-year-old suspect into custody and charged him with attempted murder, but police say more arrests will come. The shooting started as a fight between two individuals:
A 15-year-old male has been arrested in connection with a shooting close to Florida A&M University’s Bragg Memorial Stadium over the weekend that injured 12 people, according to police.
The Tallahassee Police Department said Monday that detectives had arrested the teenager Sunday in connection with the shooting. The teenager is facing 11 counts of attempted second-degree murder and possession of a firearm by a delinquent. ...
Police said Monday that they were continuing to investigate the incident but that preliminary findings indicated “a physical altercation occurred before shots were fired” and that “the incident stemmed from a dispute between individuals known to one another.”
Perhaps prosecutors can add "terminal stupidity" to the list of charges. The alleged perps seem to have shot everything except what they wanted to hit:
They added that “none of the victims appear to have been the intended targets.”
Keep all this in mind as we answer one key question: What mass shooting? I happened across the video this morning while researching a different story. Granted, I usually make it a point to disconnect on Sundays, but I was on Twitter for a good part of the day yesterday and saw nothing about a mass shooting, let alone one conducted by teens. Normally, these events blow up everyone's timelines, especially as gun-control groups use these incidents to argue for expanding gun-control laws rather than tougher enforcement of existing laws. With Florida's relatively sane Second Amendment policies and contentious elections underway, the relative silence on this shooting seems ... peculiar.
One explanation might be that the first blush on this story looks more like a gang issue than the kind of mass-shooting event that drives arguments for gun control. Having multiple shooters, at least as investigators seem to be suggesting, lends itself to that speculation. It also arises in the wake of the shootout at an Edina, MN homecoming between Somali gangs that have penetrated the high-income suburbs of Minneapolis, and similar gang shootouts even further out from the core of Minneapolis in Bloomington and Eden Prairie. Local progressives, particularly in the Somali community, claim guns are the issue there, but gun-control groups have been relatively quiet on those incidents, too.
The irony is that there is much more room for law-enforcement intervention in gang-related violence (if that's what this was) than in punishing law-abiding citizens for the actions of lunatics. We don't know yet what specifically led to the shooting, but we do know how the Protection Racket Media's reaction differed from its usual, narrative-driven coverage of such events. That alone highlights the hypocrisy of the media and activist response to shootings, such as we saw briefly in the Bend, Oregon, school shooting that activists still want to make into a gun-control issue. It makes one wonder whether we'll ever get a full accounting of what happened at Florida A&M this weekend, or if it will dissipate into "local story" oblivion.