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Navy Yard shootings and false reports
Interesting article here. It points out the initial reports said there were two shooters, using AR-15s, and then named as the dead shooter a fellow who was home in Virginia at the time of the shootings and as might be expected, not dead at all. But other than that....
Now in Houston, getting ready to speak at SAF's Gun Rights Policy Conference tomorrow. The hotel is amazing. It's right on the edge of the airport -- I can look out and see planes taxying, and outside smell the burned jet fuel, but inside it's quite quiet.
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What amazes me is this phenomenon I've observed over the years: people find that whenever the media treats a topic on which they have real knowledge, they almost always observe that the media has it all wrong. Still, they tend to believe that the media get is right in all other areas.
@Ken M: You have august company. Michael Crichton dubbed it the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" (obfuscated URL to avoid spam blocking, sorry) :
h++p://www,goodreads,com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you
Sort of like this news report?
www dot youtube dot com forward slash watch?v equals sbbI04_TE6I
If you ask the average uninformed voter about it, they have the impression that evil AR-15s were involved... The first (false) impression gets imprinted and the low key retractions don't register.
So, for propaganda purposes, if you were unethical, you would sensationally "report" any unverified rumor that fits the narrative that supports your agenda. Not that any of our upstanding, principled, news organizations in the US would do that...
This is gonna happen, so get used to it. Eyewitness accounts are unreliable and the police can't take chances, so when they get conflicting reports about what the shooter looks like (which is probably gonna be all the time: if you're hanging around long enough to get a really really good description of Mister Psycho you're probably about to move from "Witness" to "Victim"), they report it as "suspected second shooter"- because they can't risk reporting only one shooter and finding out that there's more than one.
The Press, trusting souls that they are, think "suspected" means "fo'realz,yo" and report it as such.
The AR-15 thing is simpler: that's what they want it to be, so that's what they report.
So somehow we are supposed to be surprised when the press gets it wrong? At this point, and honestly for years now, I believe nothing they tell me. I would check to see if the sun came up if they said it did.
But isn't it funny how fast it died out when the shooter turned to be black.