Left-leaning media outlets wasted little time in crafting a new anti-gun narrative following a deadly shooting in Boulder, Colo., that left a veteran police officer and several others dead, critics noted on Tuesday.

During a Monday segment on CNN, national security contributor Juliette Kayyem suggested that the country may be headed into a “spring and summer” of mass shootings following the March 16 killings at three separate spas that left eight people dead.

“There’s a larger story here that may not be addressed today, but is one that we have to address in light of what happened in Atlanta, which is are we facing a spring and summer of mass casualty events as we come out — as people congregate. That is something that the Biden White House will have to address as well,” she said. 

“How can that be? How can that be that after a year of basic quarantine in the country the first thing we do as Americans is go back to mass shootings? How can that be?” Alisyn Camerota, the host, responded. 

Kayyem replied that the shootings are “distinctly and sadly an American problem,” noting that while such incidents did not occur throughout the past year, gun violence nevertheless rose.

“There were not mass shootings like we’ve seen in the past, but gun violence was actually up by 25 percent,” she said. “We don’t know if that’s because of psychological stresses, suicides, or whatever else, so I know a lot of people are saying ‘well, America is back’—you know what? America never left. We have a gun problem and is one that was persistent through COVID, but one that may take on more deadly consequences because people are congregating and out again.”

Others have blamed the left’s attempts to justify the hundreds of Antifa and BLM-led riots that occurred last year amid a backdrop of ‘defund the police’ efforts that created a new rise in violence and gun crimes.

The rush to judgment by CNN was called out by gun rights supporters and the pro-gun media.

“CNN is sick,” Human Events editor Ian Miles Cheong and Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra both noted on Twitter.

CNN on Boulder: “Are we facing a spring and summer of mass casualty events?”

“How can that be — after a year of basic quarantine in the country, the first thing we do as Americans is go back to mass shootings? How can that be?" pic.twitter.com/ayp186g7Kz

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 23, 2021

“While there’s still a lot we don’t know about the shooting in Boulder, Colorado that left ten people dead on Monday, the media is already starting to craft a narrative that more gun control laws could have prevented the attack,” Cam Edwards, of the gun-related news site Bearing Arms, wrote.

“One focus of the anti-gun media: a ban on so-called assault weapons that was put in place in Boulder back in 2018. Just last week a state judge blocked the ban from being enforced because it violated the state’s firearm preemption law, and already outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post are highlighting the judge’s decision and inferring that, had it been left in place, maybe the shooting wouldn’t have happened,” he added.

Both newspapers tended to focus on the reversal of the ban rather than the fact that the alleged shooter likely would not have paid attention to it anyway after having made up his mind to act.

“We tried to protect our city,” Dawn Reinfeld, co-founder of Blue Rising, a Colorado-based gun violence prevention group, told the Post. “It’s so tragic to see the legislation struck down, and days later, to have our city experience exactly what we were trying to prevent.”

The Post also quoted Colorado State Rep. Tom Sullivan, a Democrat who ran for office after his son, Alex, was shot and killed during a mass shooting at an Aurora movie theater in 2012.

“The assault weapons put the ‘mass’ in the ‘shootings,’” he told the paper. “That’s what gets the numbers up. That’s what gets the assault weapons that were able to fire as many rounds as were fired … in the theater, in the schools, in Parkland.”

Edwards went on to note that Colorado has had a ban on high-capacity magazines since 2013 as well as a universal background check requirement on all gun sales, including between private individuals. And yet, he noted, violent crime in the state was increasing even before the BLM riots of 2020.

“I wish that we lived in a political environment where the calls for new gun control laws at least waited until we learned the names of the victims, but that’s not part of the gun control movement’s messaging playbook, which depends on using tragedies like this for maximum political gain,” he wrote.

After the airing of this segment, the identity of the Boulder shooting suspect was revealed as Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, who is reportedly a Trump-hating Muslim immigrant from Syria. This revelation threw elitist blue check Twitter into a tailspin after widely reporting it was a white male who perpetrated the horrific carnage.

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Jon Dougherty

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Jon is a staff writer for BizPac Review with 30 years' worth of reporting experience, as well as an author and U.S. Army veteran. He has a BA in political science from Ashford University and an MA in national security studies/intelligence analysis from American Military University.

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