News Media Self-Awareness, Illustrated

thing is bad; also, thing is good

Take exactly the same argument about exactly the same event and wedge it into two very different frames. Watch the result.

Here’s Politico, today, attending the NRA convention in Texas in the aftermath of a mass shooting at a school…

…and finding that NRA members are still gun-addled idiots who deflect concerns about guns by inventing a stupid fantasy argument — a conspiracy theory! — about mental illness:

Here, amid acres of guns and tactical gear inside a cavernous convention hall, the proximate cause of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, was not a rifle, but mental illness, shadowy forces of evil or, as one man in a “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt put it, the “destruction of our children” by the teachings of the left.

These idiots, can you believe that? They were actually dumb enough to argue that the rifle didn’t cause the shooting. What morons! Imagine being so caught up in stupid far-right conspiracy theories that you’d blame a school shooting on mental illness.

Okay, now. Watch this.

On the very same day, Politico posted this story, right underneath the NRA story on the front page:

And this is what Politico says those professors found:

POLITICO: Can you take us through the profile of mass shooters that emerged from your research?

Peterson: There’s this really consistent pathway. Early childhood trauma seems to be the foundation, whether violence in the home, sexual assault, parental suicides, extreme bullying. Then you see the build toward hopelessness, despair, isolation, self-loathing, oftentimes rejection from peers. That turns into a really identifiable crisis point where they’re acting differently. Sometimes they have previous suicide attempts.

The professors go on to say that the start of the solution to the crisis of school shootings is to improve the quality of childhood mental health services: “We need to build teams to investigate when kids are in crisis and then link those kids to mental health services. The problem is that in a lot of places, those services are not there. There’s no community mental health and no school-based mental health.”

Same publication, same day, same page.

NRA members are atavistic morons who are so stupid that they think mental illness and childhood trauma cause school shootings, which is an idiotic conspiracy theory; also, these very wise social science professors, who are experts we should be listening to, make the deeply insightful argument that mental illness and childhood trauma cause school shootings.

These stories are adjacent.

The NRA members are folk devils, so when they say X, X is profoundly stupid and evil; but social science professors are coded as benevolent and wise, so when they say X, X is really smart. And X — precisely identical X — can be both things on the same day. And the writers and the editors don’t notice.

NRA idiots spew insane conspiracy theory that mental illness and childhood trauma cause school shootings.

Brilliant professors reveal sophisticated conclusion that mental illness and childhood trauma cause school shootings.

That’s the news.