What the media won't say about Chris Lane's murder

[n2doc]

On an average day, about 40 people are murdered very day in the United States. That, in and of itself, is unconscionable, but there are some killings that are so beyond awful that they reach out -- sometimes from the other side of America -- and punch you in the gut. The violent death of an Australian baseball player named Chris Lane -- gunned down, according to police, by three teenagers in a passing car as he jogged through the streets of Duncan, Oklahoma -- is one of these.

The story is at turns maddening and revolting. Lane was a handsome and fit 22-year-old with a devoted girlfriend who left his homeland to come halfway around the world to master the sport that Americans invented. Instead, he was killed -- ironically, for "sport" -- by total strangers, a interracial gaggle of gang wannabes who told police they murdered Lane (and, for what it's worth, threw the rest of their own lives away) because they were "bored" and had nothing else to do.

There's small comfort in knowing that there most certainly will be justice here -- that the three alleged killers are in custody and will surely be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But the story has remained alive -- on talk radio, cable news, and on the top of widely read websites -- because of the mind-numbing senselessness of it all. There's never a good reason for taking another human's life, but the murder of Chris Lane -- by all accounts so far -- has absolutely no reason behind it whatsoever.

But yet while no one can reasonably claim that this Oklahoma tragedy has been ignored, there's one aspect of the killing that jumps off the page, and yet -- but for a couple of isolated exceptions -- has been all but banned as a topic for discussion.

No doubt, we need to have a conversation about the immorality that would cause someone of high school age to murder out of boredom.

But -- yet again -- there seems to be a blackout on discussions about how America is unique among places in the world where bored and morally unformed teenagers have such easy access to deadly guns.


Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/What-the-media-wont-say-about-Chris-Lanes-murder.html

[Tommy_Carcetti]

1. Well apparently some would rather race bait and turn it into "their" Trayvon Martin case....

....even though there's been no evidence so far to suggest that the killing was racially motivated.

[CanSocDem]

2. It's not easy...

...discussing cultural decay. Focusing on punishment is just 'kicking the can down the road'.


.

[get the red out]

3. Absolutely!!!!

I can't think of much that is more irresponsible than the access to guns that everyone has.

[cali]

4. I don't think it's been established that they murdered "out of boredom"

and judging from facebook postings, I don't think race can be ruled out. Just because one of the suspects stated that it was "out of boredom" hardly makes that definitive.

Nor do I think there's been a blackout on the discussion that we're awash with guns and teens have access to them.

Some of the claims in this article are not only absurd. Comparing deciding to kill someone- for whatever reason- and throwing a snowball at passing cars? C'mon. There was nothing split second about the decision these kids made to kill. At least one of them had posted about planning to kill people.

"think about it. You were a teenager once, and so you know that teenagers -- OK, maybe not you, but people you went to school with -- do some really, really dumb things. Give a bored 16-year-old a snowball and some passing cars, and he'll be chased into the woods by a cop. Give him a handful of rocks, and he's going down to the stationhouse. But in Duncan, Okla.., that kid had a .22 caliber revolver. We don't know yet how that happened -- but we know that a good man is dead and three young lives can't be redeemed because of a split-second, irrevocable decision to pull the trigger on a gun."

[Skip Intro]

5. +100. n/t

[cali]

7. this is hard to talk about

it's complex- this issue of race and biases.

[sinkingfeeling]

6. Excellent op ed piece!