You probably heard about yesterday's horrors in San Bernardino California. If you haven't, let us fill you in.
28-year-old Syed Rizwan Farook and 27-year-old Tashfeen Malik killed 14 people and wounded 18 in a mass shooting at the Inland Regional Center, located 60 miles east of Los Angeles. The Inland Regional Center is a state-run facility for individuals with developmental disabilities.
Appalling. Disgusting. Unconscionable. Deplorable. Tragic. All of it.
What's worse? According to the crowdsourced database, the Mass Shooting Tracker, this was the 1,044th mass shooting in the past 1,066th days in the United States.
Or, more succinctly, there have been more mass shootings than calendar days.
Clearly, we're immersed in a horrific cultural trend of mass shootings of which we can't seem to find our way out. We are at a stand-still legislatively, ideologically, and morally as to whether or not the United States has a gun problem.
Let us be very, extremely, excruciatingly clear: we have a gun problem.
[anad]
Worse though, is these mass shootings aren't the only horrific cultural trend we're drowning in. There's also this pronounced, viciously ugly trend of Islamaphobia. Have you heard of it? Well, the New York Post has.
No, the New York Post hasn't just heard of it; they're perpetuating it in a huge, wildly unacceptable way.
This morning, Twitter user Andrew Peng posted about a disturbing change to the New York Post's front page. At first, the Post read: "MURDER MISSION," but was later edited to read: "MUSLIM KILLERS."
This is problematic for many reasons, but the most obvious reason, one that too many people/organizations/companies/glorified tabloids are ignoring, is that entire religions and races haven't been demonized in the wake of one person's crimes to the extent that Islam has.
That might just be a fundamental failure in understanding what Islam is, what Muslims believe, and how little ISIS or any extremist branch resembles the religion's core values.
Prime example of this? Dylan Roof murdered 9 people in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina last summer, and he wasn't advertised as a white killer. The media didn't blame his entire race for his crimes. The media blamed mental health. They didn't call it domestic terrorism.
Which, to be clear: That's what that was. That's what the shooting at the Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs last week was. Yes, it's a real thing when you apply a working definition to the facts of the situation.
Of course, you would think that a tabloid wouldn't need to revise its story, the way they tell it, or who/what to blame exactly after they've run it. Turns out, the New York Post thought they needed to take a second pass at an already-horrific headline.
Oh, hey, New York Post: That's not okay. We cannot forgive the blatant hate in that revision. We get it; sometimes the headline doesn't go out the way you wanted it to. Sometimes it needs a little tinkering. It happens. Again, we get it.
However, when that revision takes on an entire religion, assigns blame to something much larger than the individuals in play, and is so flagrantly ignorant of simple, journalistic ethics (again, this is the New York Post we're talking about), we can't accept it. We can't forgive it. It's abhorrent.
[anad2]
As much as we're flabbergasted by the New York Post's religious-- not the racial identification or the descriptive ethnicity stated as fact --targeting, at least the New York Daily News nailed yesterday's headline.
The Daily News' cover read, "As latest bath of innocent Americans are left lying in pools of blood, cowards who could truly end gun scourge continue to hide behind meaningless platitudes."
To the Daily News, we'll say rock on. To our country's lawmakers, it's far past time to change our country's gun laws so innocent Americans stop getting murdered. Finally, to the New York Post, we're begging you; get it together, or close shop already.
Check out This NYC Graffiti Artist Create an Anti-ISIS Subway Mural.
[Feature Image Courtesy Twitter]