For many years the legacy media have identified firearms as the major social problem, one that has to be dealt with by restricting the rights of law-abiding citizens to acquire and retain guns. Whenever some criminal, terrorist, or lunatic blows people away using a gun, politicians and TV talking heads belabor the populace with diatribes about “gun violence” — as if guns made the decision to kill innocent people, rather than maniacs and thugs.
In recent days, however, the issue has moved up a notch to the next level of abstraction. Whenever somebody starts spraying bullets into a crowd, the media reports tell us that “gunfire erupted”. In other woods, there is no agency whatsoever involved in the slaughter — the gunfire just kind of happened, like thunder on a hot summer afternoon.
I’m not sure when “gunfire erupted” became the stock media phrase, but I first noticed it a few days ago. And this morning, while going through items for the news feed, I ran into it twice. First, from NBC News in Alabama:
Four people were killed and 32 injured in the gunfire that erupted at the celebration.
And then NBC News again, in Texas:
Payton Washington, 18, was shot in the leg and the back in the gunfire that erupted around 12:15 a.m. Tuesday in an H-E-B parking lot in Elgin, her father, Kelan Washington, said.
Maybe the phrase is in NBC’s current style book.
That pesky gunfire just keeps erupting! It’s like cosmic rays — it just happens. The only way to keep people safe is to take away their right to own firearms. That’ll fix it.
Now that I’m aware of the phenomenon, I’ll keep an eye out for more “gunfire erupted” news stories. If I get a large enough collection of them, I may need to do another post.
It’s along the same lines as “SUV runs over (insert victim/s)”.
Rush Limbaugh was the first to point out the phenomenon back in the 90s when SUVs first started appearing on the roads.
No, it’s one level of abstraction above that.
In the example you cited, the SUV does something. But when “gunfire erupts”, nothing does anything. It’s like saying “a process exists”. It’s a deed with no doer. A totally passive voice, which is of course the most suitable voice in a totalitarian society.
Baron: “Journalists” use the “gunfire erupted” construct to avoid sounding racist, in a wink-wink sort of way. Once the term is employed, we are supposed to ignore the facts, circumstances, and people involved and accept the incident as an inexplicable act of nature.
As a narrative construct, the term is very effective. Most people fall for it, every time, just as they do with the term “mass shooting,” about which we are supposed to jump immediately to specific conclusion about the facts, circumstances and people involved.
“Mass shooting” is very misleading. They use it to include situations when gang-bangers spray the room with gunfire in one of their turf wars, but the reader who sees the term thinks of a Sandy Hook-type situation.
Yes, exactly.
*
*
The Minneapolis City Council has agreed to allow the city’s mosques to broadcast loud prayer calls five times a day. What good will this do? If prayers are said five times a day, believers will undoubtedly know the times.
But there is a point.
“Allah is greater”, the mosques cry, and the implication is that Allah rules here. It is no longer the domain of unbelievers, but of believers. The call to prayer is thus a triumphant manifestation that the area is now under the control of the Prophet’s masters. And they have the right to do so.
Despite decades of effort by people who have studied Islam, the media and politicians refuse to understand, and Islamization continues as planned. The left and its allies among the “bourgeoisie” are happy until one day the men of Allah pull them away.
The developments in Minneapolis, where my Biden faithful family lives, remind me of something I wrote in 2016:
Allah is great in Dearborn
The only good argument for Islam is that when Allah’s religion rules everywhere, there must at least be peace. Maybe an eerie peace, but still peace and absence of bloodshed. When the last infidel has been expelled or converted, there should be no more to fight against. Humanity can then enter a state of eternal rest.
It was therefore with great anticipation that I traveled to Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit, in March 2016. Dearborn was once a major bastion of organized labor, specifically the tens of thousands of auto workers employed at Ford’s famous River Rouge plants. It was the site of some of the American labour movement’s most iconic battles in the 1930s and 1940s, when tens of thousands of workers literally fought against Ford’s organized thugs. Now there are no industrial workers left in Dearborn. The area has become almost 100 percent Muslim and Muslims are not involved in industry to any great extent.
As far as I know, no Danish journalist has been to Dearborn. They are in Washington or New York, where they can easily get hold of the New York Times and the Washington Post, so they can entertain Danish TV viewers with Donald Trump’s nonsense.
Few infidels venture in, but I knew a Christian woman who runs a couple of mission stations in the center of the ghetto. How she has managed to survive, God knows. She showed me around two buildings where she proselytizes for Christ. In fact, every now and then she manages to get a Muslim girl to throw off her chains. When that happens, she has to be smuggled out of Dearborn. Otherwise she will be killed by her family.
No one knows exactly how many people live in Dearborn or how they got there. Starting in the 1920s, there was a core of Yemenis that Henry Ford brought here as cheap labor, but in recent decades the Muslim population has exploded. Estimates put the number at 50 000, but it could be much higher. One thing is certain: they are all Muslims. Yes, going back to American times, there is an Italian restaurant.
I was in Dearborn for a whole day and didn’t see a single police officer. But what would the police do in a zone that has been handed over to another legal system? Which is no longer the United States.
So Muslim peace and harmony has descended on Dearborn, I thought as we drove through the ghetto. Everyone here believes the same thing.
“Look over there,” my missionary said. “Here in the southern part of Dearborn are the Yemenis. They can’t be where the taller Arabs rule.”
We drove around the surrounding countryside, and in a plow field I noticed what looked like a mosque. My guide confirmed this. What was it doing here, where no one lived?
“We see this in many places,” she replied. “The purpose of these mosques is to mark that the surrounding land now belongs to Allah. The whole conquest strategy is carefully planned and financed by rich sheikhs from the Gulf.”
In the European debate, it has often been argued that integration works much better in the US than what we are used to in Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, etc.
I no longer believe that. It is the same everywhere.
+++
written by Lars Hedegaard, translated from Danish by LN.
originally published on snaphanrn.dk – 4/19/23
There will never be peace even if only muslims are left alive.
They are divided into various groups like Shiite, Sunni, Alawite etc and these groups hate each other with a passion that make the religious wars of Europe (Pagan like Vikings, Catholic, Protestant etc) look like a “Give everybody a hug of friendship”.
As with Slick Willy’s “bimbo eruptions,” “gunfire erupted” is a politico-journalistic construct, used to divert attention from the deserving target–be it a shameless cad, such as Bill Clinton, or a street thug with a gun.
Of course, today’s typical “journalist” would be unaware of the political origins of “bimbo eruptions,” simply using “gunfire erupted” out of laziness.
You jogged my memory; I had completely forgotten about “bimbo eruptions”!
I believe it was the hag herself who coined the term. I’m actually quite shocked that she didn’t have any of them “arkancided”.
Well the Hag got more women than ole Bill ever did.
If a high percentage of legal gun owners caused the shootings which plague the US, Switzerland would be like the Wild West.
Yes, I long ago my parents and I made holidays in Switzerland and I was invited by a swiss man, known to my dad, to look at his rifles.
He had two fully automatic service rifles incl 100 shot each at home.
On top of his 5 civilian firearms.
(Yes, I know that nearly all of the gun owners in the USA have more guns, but how many have fully automatic rifles at home?)
Sometimes I wish I had been born in Switzerland.
Shootings don’t plague the US; when you remove the numbers from blacks in about a dozen urban jungles shooting other blacks the plague of gun crime in the US falls below almost all of Europe; certainly far below Sweden.
Where I live in the US, its a rare household where there’s not at least one firearm. Many people including myself conceal carry on a daily basis. And shootings are almost unheard of.
Thanks. That doesn’t acccount for the school massacres which seem to be almost exclusively a US phenomenon? I understand the perpetrators have sometimes been youths who recently came off anti-psychotic meds.