What You're Not Hearing About the Michigan State Shooting

The problem is not lack of gun control. The problem is lack of resolve.

Here’s the entire New York Times account of the triple murder at Michigan State University as reported in the Times’ February 14 “Evening Briefing” (emphasis added):

The police identified the victims in the Michigan State shooting but not the motive.

All three of the victims who were shot and killed on the East Lansing campus last night were students at the university, the authorities said. The shootings set off a three-hour police manhunt and forced students to hide in dormitories and classrooms until a tip led police to the gunman.

Officials identified the victims as Alexandria Verner, 20, a junior from Clawson, Mich.; Brian Fraser, 20, a sophomore from Grosse Pointe, Mich.; and Arielle Diamond Anderson, 19, of Harper Woods, Mich. Here’s what we know about them.

The gunman, whom the authorities identified as Anthony McRae, 43, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He lived in nearby Lansing but had no apparent connection to the university, and he had been arrested once before for carrying a concealed firearm without a permit. The police in the town where he went to school said he had a history of mental illness.

The police in East Lansing are still searching for what motivated the gunman: “We have no idea why he came to campus,” the interim deputy chief of the university police said.

For a few students at Michigan State, the attack came with a chilling sense of familiarity: They had been nearby during the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., or survived the Oxford High School shooting in a town outside of Detroit in November 2021. By this morning, the university’s iconic rock had been painted with the question: “How many more?”

Ahh yes, how many more?

The implied, angry answer to that question is, “Lots more, until those unwashed rightwing wahoos stop obstructing serious gun control legislation.” You knew, didn’t you, that Sandy Hook was going to get in this story by hook or by crook.

The actual, more troubling answer is lurking in the skimpy 14 words tucked in the middle of the story, “he had been arrested once before for carrying a concealed firearm without a permit.”

What’s the story with that? I found out only when a friend pointed me to a blog I’d never seen before, “The Other McCain,” which spills the beans. And revealing beans they are.

Although certain Internet sleuths had, by monitoring police scanners, discovered the identity of the gunman who killed three Michigan State University students and wounded five others before committing suicide, I hadn’t followed the story of Monday night’s shooting closely. So this morning, when there was a televised press conference in Lansing about the massacre, I was still waiting for them to identify the gunman. Instead, the press conference began with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer lecturing about the need to do something about guns, and continued for another 20 minutes before police finally got around to identifying the gunman as 43-year-old Anthony Dwayne McRae. By that time, I’d figured out that the shooter probably wasn’t a Trump voter.

If McRae had been a Trump activist, do you think the NYT might have mentioned that? Let me ask that another way: Does the sun still rise in the east?

Whenever liberals are downplaying the identity of the shooter [McRae is black] and his motive in such a situation, intelligent people can usually guess why they’re doing this. But it turns out that there was more to be concealed:

Wasn’t there ever.

[McRae] was arrested in Lansing and charged in June 2019 with carrying a concealed pistol without a concealed carry permit, according to Ingham County court records obtained Tuesday by The Detroit News. The initial charge was a felony that carried a potential penalty of five years in prison, according to the records.

In October 2019, Ingham County prosecutors added a second charge against McRae: possession of a loaded firearm in a vehicle, a misdemeanor. That same month, October 2019, McRae agreed to plead guilty to the lesser misdemeanor charge, and prosecutors dismissed the felony charge.

In other words, the felony charge — the one that more truly reflected McRae’s offense conduct and the degree of his potential dangerousness — got put in the shredder, and the only thing that showed up in court was the misdemeanor charge. And how seriously do we treat misdemeanors?

McRae was sentenced in November 2019 to 12 months probation. In October 2020, six additional months were added to his probation, according to court records. The addition was meant to allow him to complete the terms of the probation order, the records said.

His probation period concluded in May 2021.

If McRae had been prosecuted on the felony charge for which he was arrested, and given the available five-year sentence, he would have been in jail on February 12 rather than on the Michigan State campus — and three young people would still have lives full of promise. Instead, we have three sets of parents finding out what it’s like when you can’t wake up from your most hideous nightmare.

“The Other McCain” pretty much nails the lesson here:

This is always how it is with liberals and gun control. They’re unwilling to enforce existing laws, because they’re against putting criminals in prison, but every time there’s a mass shooting, they demand new gun-control laws, in order to punish law-abiding citizens who had nothing to do with the atrocity. So here you have a mass murderer who could have been sent to prison for five years, but was instead given a year of probation, and Gretchen Whitmer wants to seize the occasion of this tragedy to lecture us about the need to “do something,” as if the obvious solution — putting criminals in prison — were not even an option.

To be fair, for years prosecutors have routinely been plea bargaining cases down to lesser charges. There is so much crime it’s simply impossible to take everything, or anywhere close to everything, to trial. But there are two caveats pertinent to this story. First, in more recent times, prosecutors have come under pressure to give away more and more because of all the false and malicious leftwing ranting about “mass incarceration,” and in particular its supposed use to oppress black people. In fact, the increased use of incarceration starting in the latter part of last century was one of the most important factors in saving black lives, and particularly the lives of black men, who are grossly disproportionately victims of murder. In the generation after 1990, as incarceration swelled, the murder rate in the United States fell by more than half, saving tens of thousands of lives — white ones and especially black ones.

The second caveat is that, while plea bargaining is a necessary evil in a system trying to cope with huge and increasing amounts of crime, prosecutors still need to have the judgment to spot a dangerous (and probably unbalanced) defendant, like McRae, and the backbone to resist Woke calls to go light because “the system is part of Amerika’s rancid oppression of minorities.” In those cases, they must refuse to bargain and seek the more severe sentence — the one that’s needed to safeguard the public.

When prosecutors lack that judgment and backbone, you can see the results for yourself. The New York Times can do all the clever omissions it wants, but those results are on display right now in the graveyard.