For anyone paying attention, there is an established formula for whether a story about a crazed gunman story is considered newsworthy, and how long it should ‘have legs’ in the news.
We’ll come back to that math, and see how this mass shooting event stacks up against it after we lay out the known facts of this incident.
The incident itself
In Louisville Kentucky, a gunman opened fire on Old National Bank during business hours. He was live-streaming his attack on Instagram… the footage was removed quickly but is said to still be out there somewhere online.
Police named the gunman as 25-year-old Connor Sturgeon, who worked at the bank.
Four of the victims, Tommy Elliott, 63, Juliana Farmer, 57, Jim Tutt, 64, and Josh Barrick, 40 died at the scene.
The fifth victim, 57-year-old Deanna Eckert was among eight people taken to hospital, where she later died. — Sky News
Police engaged the shooter and took him down. The suspect died at the scene. One of the responding officers — newly minted Academy graduate Nick Wilt — took a bullet to the head. He underwent surgery and is now in critical but stable condition.
Officers arrived on the scene in about three minutes.
What do we know about the suspect?
We can say that Sturgeon, 6′ 4″, had been a full-time employee at this bank, (media reporting uses the phrase ‘former employee’) and the shooting is being described by the mayor and others as a ‘targeted’ attack.
The killer did (seemingly) give some advanced warning of the attack, but no timelines are given.
Broadcastify, a live audio provider, released more than 30 minutes of dispatch audio between a dispatcher and multiple LMPD officers. According to the dispatcher, Sturgeon called a friend before the attack and left a voicemail saying that he planned to “kill everyone at the bank” and that he felt “suicidal.” The dispatcher first said Sturgeon texted a friend before correcting herself, saying he called and left a voicemail. –NewsWeek
The website ‘Heavy’ found his LinkedIn profile before it went dark:
On a now-deleted LinkedIn profile, Connor Sturgeon wrote, “I am a Syndications Associate and Portfolio Banker with Old National Bank in Louisville following completion of the ONB Commercial Banking Development Training Program in April 2022. I am certified in the RMA Lending Decision Process, hold a Master’s in Finance from the University of Alabama, and am on the Young Professionals board for Junior Achievement of Kentuckiana.”
Sturgeon began working as a commercial development professional at the bank in June 2021 and moved into his most recent role in April 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile –Heavy
Heavy also reported some of his social media history:
A Twitter profile that belonged to Sturgeon has also been taken down. According to The Daily Beast, the now-deleted Twitter account included, “posts in support of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, as well as some criticism of police violence and of then-President Donald Trump,” alongside tweets about the NBA, sports and messages between friends.
Sturgeon also appears to have been at one-point a frequent poster on Reddit. An account matching his Twitter and Instagram handle, csturg41, was suspended by Reddit after the shooting. Heavy viewed the account prior to its being taken down. Many of the posts, including the most recent, were about sports and video games, including a post three days ago about the Dallas Mavericks missing the NBA playoffs.
Sturgeon also posted political memes, mainly mocking conservatives, former President Donald Trump and Fox News, on several subreddits, including “DankMemes,” “F***thealtright,” and “trollychromosome,” along with “Leopardsatemyface.” He posted a meme in July 2020 on the “f***thealtright” subreddit of a cartoon of a musclar figure responding to someone asking how he got his muscles by saying, “Every time Trump tweets some racist s*** …. I do one push up.” –Heavy
Another post stated: “Seeing the entire internet plan a raid on Aera 51 instead of ICE detention centers,” which was accompanied by a character stating, “We were on the verge of greatness. We were this close.”
In regards to one post titled “Trump retreats to Alabama, just so he can finally be cheered at a sporting event. lol, what a frail pathetic thin-skinned loser” Sturgeon wrote “I’ll be doing my part to make sure it is not the warm response he’s looking for.” –PostMillenial
So he’s a Trump-hating lefty working in the banking industry who ‘snapped’ and shot up the place en route to can only be described as ‘suicide by cop’. He was also a big fan of lockdowns.
With that groundwork established…
Here are the ‘rules’ of whether a story is ‘newsworthy’ in the mainstream press.
If the aggressor can be connected to someone the left would consider an ‘oppressor’ group — checking one or more boxes from ‘White’, ‘Conservative’, ‘Christian’, and ‘Man’, the story is deemed important because it supports the narrative that the oppressor class really IS the threat that activists have been claiming all along.
When possible, those aspects of the attacker’s personality are made into the central aspects of the story.
We routinely see knee-jerk accusations of ‘white supremacist’ violence etc when the victims are non-white. (When it later turns out that the ‘racist’ killer was also non-white, those stories are quietly dropped and forgotten, often without retractions or apologies.)
If the aggressor is in one or more of the minority/oppressed categories, either they will be downplayed, or some will reframe the violence as a response to some kind of bad treatment by an oppressor class.
But more likely, stories that are inconvenient to the narrative quickly pivot to some other Democrat narrative or fall out of the news cycle completely.
For example, when a Christian school was shot up by a female-to-male transexual, the preferred storyline wasn’t about the killer, and it CERTAINLY wasn’t about anti-Christian bigotry.
No. That shooting story became a story about the tool said killer used to kill her victims: the scary black rifle.
In the Kentucky bank shooting, we have already seen a rush to politicize this story (and make it about Dem v. Republicans) by no less a persona than America’s great unifier, Joe Biden, before the bodies were yet cold.
Scarecely 4 hours after the shooting, Joe was already making it a political issue.
One might almost think those deaths are more important to him as a means to a political end (gun legislation) than they are as actual men and women whose lives were cut short by the poisoned mind of a murderous psychopath.
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Sources Cited
SkyNews
