by Political Editors: Mass murders are shocking, leaving many people stunned and looking for answers and possible solutions. The New York Times, with its anti-gun agenda, would like people to believe that these mass shootings are not relatively rare events but are rather occurring at a frequency that borders on epidemic levels. Monday the editorial board of the Times ran a bare-numbers article entitled “477 Days. 521 Mass Shootings. Zero Action From Congress.” Here is yet another example of the Times playing fast and loose with both definitions and statistics in order to push an agenda rather than honestly present the facts.
In order to come up with these dubious numbers the Times played a schematics game. Using the anti-Second Amendment Gun Violence Archive’s politicized definition of “mass shooting” rather than the FBI’s official definition, the Times was able to massively inflate the number of “mass shootings.” For the Times, a mass shooting is defined as involving “four or more people injured or killed in a single event at the same time and location” [emphasis added]. The FBI’s definition is three or more people killed in a single event.
Second, the Times piece does not further delineate the numbers to include the FBI’s definition of “active shooter,” which is an “individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” As a result, the FBI numbers on mass shootings differ significantly from those reported by the Times. From 2014-2015 the FBI recorded 40 active shooter situations that lead to 92 deaths. Over that same period of time the Gun Violence Archive claimed that there were 607 “mass shootings.” Are mass shootings at epidemic levels in America? According to the facts, the answer is no. But when has the Times ever let the facts get in the way of its leftist agenda?
Finally, speaking of this bias, in its reports this morning, the Times still includes the assailant among its count of the victims, noting the assault was “one of the deadliest mass shootings in the United States, which left 59 people dead — including the gunman.” To include the assailant in the count with the people he murdered is unconscionable and is profoundly offensive to the families of his victims. But the Times’ editors are in such a vacuum that they are unable to discern why this is not acceptable. The same goes for other Leftmedia outlets that will continue to use the wrong death toll in the coming days. ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/51663
{themuslimissue.wordpress.com} ~ Sheikh Suleiman Anwar Bengharsa, head of the Islamic Jurisprudence Center in Clarksburg, Maryland, gave a lecture in Toronto, Canada in 2010... in which he said that Muslims could only live in the land of the infidels under certain circumstances, one of which was to do da’wa. “When the caliphate is established, you need to pack your bags and go home,” he said. In the lecture on the jurisprudence of interaction with non-Muslims, which was delivered at the Abu Huraira Center in Toronto and posted on YouTube in August 2010, Bengharsa stressed that historically, Islam had been spread by the sword and said that the purpose of Jihad is to establish the law of Allah and that while you can’t force a person to believe in Allah, “you can force him to live by the shari’a.” https://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2017/10/04/us-cleric-goal-of-jihad-is-to-implement-sharia-non-muslims-should-convert-to-gain-rights/
{townhall.com} ~ "An act of pure evil," said President Trump of the atrocity in Las Vegas, invoking our ancient faith: "Scripture teaches us the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit."
"Our unity cannot be shattered by evil. Our bonds cannot be broken by violence," Trump went on in his most presidential moment, "and though we feel such great anger at the senseless murder of our fellow citizens, it is love that defines us today and always will. Forever."
Or will this massacre be like the Sandy Hook Elementary School slaughter of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, or Charleston massacre of black churchgoers by Dylan Roof -- uniting us briefly in "sadness, shock and grief" only to divide us again and, more deeply, in our endless war over guns.
"In memory of the fallen, I have directed that our great flag be flown at half-staff," said the president. As he spoke, the mind went back to yesterday afternoon where the NFL was roiled anew by athletes earning seven-figure salaries "taking a knee" in disrespect of that flag.
Also on Sunday, cable TV was given over to charges that Trump, attending a golf tournament in New Jersey, cared nothing about the suffering of "people of color" in Puerto Rico.
And we just closed out a summer where monuments honoring the explorers and missionaries who discovered the New World and the men who made the America we have been blessed to inherit have, along with those of Confederate soldiers, been desecrated and dragged down.
To understand what is happening to us, we should look to Europe, where the disintegration appears more advanced.
Sunday, 4,000 national police, sent by Madrid, used violence to break up a referendum called by the regional government of Catalonia on secession. Nine in 10 of those able to cast a ballot voted to secede from Spain.
Televised pictures from Barcelona of police clubbing and dragging voters away from the polls, injuring hundreds, may make this a Selma moment in the history of Europe.
This is the first of the specters haunting Europe: the desire of ethnic minorities like Catalans in Spain and Scots in Britain to break free of the mother country and create new nations, as the Norwegians did in 1905 and the Irish did in 1921.
The second is the desire of growing millions of Europeans to overthrow the transnational regime that has been raised above them, the EU.
The English succeeded with Brexit in 2016. Today, almost every country in Europe has an anti-EU party like the National Front in France, which won 35 percent of the presidential vote in 2017.
Beyond the tribal call of ethnic solidarity is a growing resentment in Northern Europe at having to bail out the chronic deficits of the South, and in Southern Europe at the austerity imposed by the North.
Angela Merkel as the new "leader of the West" in the time of Trump is an idea that has come and gone. She is a diminished figure.
Some 13 percent of the votes went to Alternative for Germany, a far-right party that, for the first time, will enter the Bundestag. In states of the former East Germany, the AfD ran second or even first.
What produced this right turn in Germany is what produced it in Hungary and Poland: migration from Africa and the Middle East that is creating socially and culturally indigestible enclaves in and around the great cities of Europe.
Europeans, like Trumpians, want their borders secured and closed to the masses of the Third World.
Germans are weary of 70 years of wearing sackcloth and ashes.
Race, tribe, borders, culture, history -- issues of identity -- are tearing at the seams of the EU and pulling apart nations.
In the Republican Party, there is now a vast cohort of populist and nationalists who agree with Merle Haggard, "If you're runnin' down my country, man, You're walkin' on the fightin' side of me."
A massacre of Americans like that in Las Vegas may bring us together briefly. But what holds us together when issues of race, religion, ethnicity, culture, history and politics -- our cherished diversity itself -- appear to be pulling us ever further apart?
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