Devin Kelley, the Sutherland Springs shooter, has already started to be disappeared by the news media. I do not mean there is no reporting. I mean that the media template got shredded and so, like Sen. Rand Paul's attacker, Rene Boucher, a registered Democrat and in fact a far-left socialist, media are going to lose interest pretty quickly. (In fact, the most recent reporting about Rand Paul's beating is to blame him for the whole thing.)
Back to mass murderer Kelley. The template is familiar:
Certainly, everyone is familiar with a simple pattern, wherein the media initially identifies the suspect as a white, male, right-wing, Republican NRA member. As the internet begins to organize and share screenshots of the suspect’s social media, layers eventually begin to peel away from the mainstream media dossier. The suspect usually loses the attribute “Republican-registered” first. When a long history of left-wing politics emerges out of social media, the narrative shifts to “white rage” or “toxic masculinity.” Often, the suspect’s race has to go, as it emerges that he was Hispanic, Arab, or central Asian. When the information about the suspect becomes clear, the media consensus emerges: it was the gun’s fault.This is a case of Templatus Interruptus:
1. Man commits mass murder.So, a federal agency, the USAF, failed to follow federal law requiring it to report Kelley's domestic abuse conviction to the DOJ. The law is 8 U.S.C. 922(g)(9), which bans firearm possession by anyone “who has been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.” The USAF's gross negligence was why Kelly was able to buy his weapon.
2. Media and Dems blame weak gun laws and the NRA.
3. Oops - existing law covered it.
4. A federal entity failed to follow that federal law.
5. Hey, let's talk about Trump pouring koi into a fish pond in Tokyo!
It turns out that there were enough ignored warning flags about Devin Kelly to have started a semaphore battalion:
NEW BRAUNFELS, Tex. — The gunman who killed more than two dozen people in a small church outside San Antonio on Sunday had a string of troubling episodes in recent years, including an escape from a mental health facility in 2012 after he was caught sneaking guns onto an Air Force base “attempting to carry out death threats” against military superiors, according to a police report.We are getting such reporting - for now. But how long before Kelley drops down the media hole the way James Hodgkinson did. Remember him? I didn't think so.
Devin P. Kelley’s young life was riddled with warning signs, mounting during and after his time in the Air Force, including a conviction for beating his then-wife and stepson, charges of animal cruelty, mental health concerns, investigations for domestic assault, threats against his family members and a motorcycle crash that left him with lingering physical pain.
Interviews and police and military documents depict Kelley as a distressed — and at-times, violent — man in the years before authorities said he walked into the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., and fired round after round into the congregation gathered for Sunday morning services.
Police in El Paso, reported that five years before the church massacre, officers were dispatched to a bus terminal after Kelley escaped from a nearby behavioral facility. Officers wrote they were told Kelley, who was serving in the Air Force, “was a danger to himself and others” at the time and “was also facing military criminal charges.” While it is unclear why Kelley was at the behavioral facility and whether he ever faced military discipline for the threats, he was court-martialed that same year and convicted of abusing his wife and stepson.
But the Air Force has acknowledged that it did not tell federal authorities about the domestic violence conviction, which should have prevented him from buying firearms, and the revelations about Kelley’s stint in a mental health facility and making threats against his superiors raised new questions about the service’s handling of Kelley and his discharge.
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