In Search of 'Why'

WHO (unless muslim or black) WHAT (always if it is gun to be demonized) WHEN (the AP can't even figure out what year it is) WHERE (If they can find it) Why ...

In Search of 'Why' :: SteynOnline
National Review's Happy Warrior
August 14, 2012

The media conventions are pretty much chiseled in concrete by now. If a guy guns down large numbers of people while shouting "Allahu akbar!" don't worry, it's a one-off, part of no broader pattern, just a "lone wolf" who succumbed to "workplace violence" (Major Hasan at Fort Hood) or worries about impending foreclosure (the Times Square bomber) or any of the other highly specific, individual, customized circumstances to which card-carrying members of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves are prone. But if a genuine "lone wolf" guns down large numbers of people without shouting "Allahu akbar!" the media herd stampedes to ask the obvious question:

Why?

And, being dreary groupthink liberals, when they're seeking a motive for mass murder the first place they look is the livelier factions of the conservative movement: Tucson, Ariz.? Must be "toxic rhetoric . . . coming, overwhelmingly, from the right" (according to Paul Krugman of the New York Times). Aurora, Colo.? Must be something to do with the Tea Party (according to Brian Ross of ABC News).

But, of course, there is no "why." Apart from their feeble and predictable biases, the reactions of Brian Ross et al. are eminently understandable: A reporter is a storyteller, and a story with no motivation is fundamentally defective. A couple of weeks back, I was in County Down, one of my favorite places on earth but one not untouched by Northern Ireland's three decades of "Troubles." Even today, round the Mountains of Mourne, in overwhelmingly Loyalist towns huge Jubilee banners of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh hang over narrow village streets with the in-your-face triumphalism of Saddam posters at traffic circles in Tikrit back in the good old days, while down the road in overwhelmingly Republican towns the thoroughfares are stark and unadorned. I motored through Warrenpoint, a small, somnolent town where on one day two fertilizer bombs exploded near Narrow Water Castle and killed 18 soldiers — the British army's single biggest loss of the entire campaign. Whenever I pass the cozily bucolic setting — the castle is now a prestige venue for wedding rentals — it seems to me faintly absurd to have killed that many for so small a cause. But what are we to make of Aurora, where large numbers of people die for no cause other than a homicidal movie tie-in?
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