Guns in the media and the SPU shooting

Apparently it’s not the media’s job to inform anymore but to incite. It’s not about reporting the facts anymore, it’s about how to get as many pageviews and clickthroughs as possible and the best way to do that is to piss people off. For example, take an article from the Seattle Times about Seattle Pacific University shooter Aaron Ybarra.

The headline from the article is “SPU shooting suspect once had AK-47, 7 other firearms at home”. The article constantly mentions that Ybarra’s family owned the guns but not him. The article also goes on to state that the guns in question were stolen from the home and none of the guns mentioned were the one that Ybarra used when he killed SPU student Paul Lee.

The article also obsesses over the fact that one of the guns owned by the Ybarra family was an AK-47. I don’t know why the AK-47 keeps getting demonized just because it’s one of the most mass-produced guns in the entire world. It’s the Toyota Camry of guns. It is no more or less deadly than any other gun but for some reason the media has this obsession over the AK-47.

What really gets me is that while the article obsesses over guns that had no part whatsoever in the SPU shooting it totally buries the lede in the article.

Aaron Ybarra and his family members kept eight firearms in a safe at their Mountlake Terrace home, even though Ybarra had been hospitalized in 2010 after hearing the voice of Columbine killer Eric Harris telling him to hurt people, documents say.

Emphasis mine.

So let’s blame the shooting on guns and not the fact that he’s a psychotic mutant.

While I consider myself to be a centrist on the issue of guns, having guns in the house is not like having some kind of radioactive element in the house that infects everybody with wanting to kill disease by being exposed to it.