On Tuesday, we finally found out the names of the two adults who have been arrested and charged in the shooting during the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl championship parade last week.
According to CBS News, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker told reporters that Lyndell Mays, 23, and Dominic Miller, 18, were being charged with second-degree murder after a verbal confrontation led to 23 people being shot, one fatally. Mays was allegedly the individual who started the verbal altercation, and Miller was supposedly the man whose bullet was responsible for killing local radio DJ Lisa Lopez-Galvan.
“According to another probable cause statement, a witness told police a group of four males approached Mays and one of them asked him what he was looking at. In surveillance video, Mays started to approach the group ‘in an aggressive manner’ and pointed at them before pulling out his gun, according to the statement,” CBS News reported.
As for Miller, surveillance video reportedly showed that he was watching the argument and then pulled out a firearm, chasing after one of the people involved in the altercation and firing at them. Miller himself was shot and fled the scene, then told police at the hospital that he was shot at and returned fire from his gun.
KSHB-TV reported that Mays was charged on Saturday but requested that his charges be sealed; they were unsealed on Tuesday. Miller was charged on Monday, and his charges were likewise made public Tuesday. Two juveniles had previously been charged with gun crimes and resisting arrest, according to NBC News, although it was unclear whether those juveniles were involved in the shooting or not. More charges are expected to be forthcoming.
Now, all of this is fairly straightforward stuff. However, someone whose name you might remember had a question before those charges were unsealed: Why are we just learning these names now?
I am trying to comprehend why the government was quick to reveal my name after I defended myself, but they still haven’t released the names of the Kansas City shooters.
— Kyle Rittenhouse (@ThisIsKyleR) February 20, 2024
“I am trying to comprehend why the government was quick to reveal my name after I defended myself, but they still haven’t released the names of the Kansas City shooters,” Kyle Rittenhouse wrote in a social media post on Tuesday afternoon.
Is Rittenhouse’s question fair?
The post went viral, being liked over 120,000 times and viewed over 7.6 million times on social platform X (formerly Twitter) as of early Wednesday morning.
Rittenhouse, as you doubtlessly recall, was quickly identified as the gunman who shot three people in Kenosha, Wisconsin, despite the fact he was 17 at the time. Yes, as CBS News reported, the then-17-year-old was charged with adult first-degree intentional homicide the day after the Aug. 25, 2020, incident which left two individuals dead and one seriously wounded.
He was later acquitted on all charges after the jury seemed to agree with his assessment that he had acted in self-defense after one of the men he killed grabbed for his gun and a mob then tried to wrest his firearm from him — or, in the case of one of those shot, pointed his gun at Rittenhouse.
You can say the case is apples-to-oranges. While there was plenty of chaos that led up to Rittenhouse’s arrest, there was little chaos in determining who the individual was: Rittenhouse turned himself into police, his picture and videos of his surrender were on social media within hours, and charges were filed the next day. It’s unclear whether he could have filed to seal those charges or if that option was available to him in Wisconsin as opposed to in Missouri, but the fact is that there was no doubt regarding the identity of the individual who was being charged in the incident.
However, this brings up the ugly question of narrative and what the media defaults to, when and if it becomes clear what happens in a mass shooting event.
In Kansas City, when the first two individuals who were charged were juveniles, the media defaulted to the gun control narrative. “After parade shooting, Kansas City leaders want to pass gun safety laws. Missouri won’t let them,” the headline at NPR’s Kansas City affiliate, KCUR-FM, declared.
“On Thursday, Kansas City Police had reported 13 homicides so far in 2024, including Lopez-Galvan. But by Friday morning, that number was already outdated: Two more people had died from guns,” the outlet reported. “But city officials have their hands tied by the state of Missouri when it comes to passing meaningful gun safety laws. Local lawmakers can’t do much, if anything at all, to regulate firearms in Kansas City.”
Never mind that, as Charles C.W. Cooke noted in an opinion piece at conservative outlet National Review, “by definition, the suspects were not legally allowed to buy, possess, or carry handguns. A ‘juvenile’ is a person who is not yet eighteen. Under federal law, one cannot purchase a handgun until one is 21, and one cannot ‘possess’ a handgun until one is 18 (unless one is hunting or target shooting, neither of which apply here). In Missouri, it is illegal to ‘recklessly’ sell, loan, or transfer any firearm to a minor without parental consent, and it is illegal to carry a firearm either openly or concealed until one is 19 (18 if a veteran or in the military).”
That didn’t stop the juvenile suspects charged last week with getting the firearms they allegedly had, and one of the adult suspects could not be legally carrying under Missouri law unless he was a veteran or in the military, neither of which I suspect he was in. Because the “mass shooting” was not a mass shooting in any traditional sense, it was the old case of guns being the culprit — and conservative lawmakers tying the hands of liberals who will Put a Stop to This Somehow™.
In Rittenhouse’s case, he was a “vigilante” — a “white supremacist” who was defending Kenosha’s businesses from “fiery but mostly peaceful” protesters. And most importantly, in case you’d forgotten, he’d “crossed state lines!“
There were no NPR affiliates or MSNBC reporters going to Kenosha, asking liberal lawmakers whether “city officials have their hands tied by the state of” Wisconsin in stopping the matter. Nothing like that. Instead, it was all about those reactionary vigilantes crossing state lines to make targets of Black Lives Matter protesters … who happened to be white criminals and/or thugs, but don’t let that stop the narrative.
Now I will say that, contra Rittenhouse, there was a reason why we didn’t, or shouldn’t have, known the names of the juvenile suspects in the shooting. But then, I’d also posit there was a reason why we shouldn’t have known Kyle Rittenhouse’s name until the appropriate time, either, and that the prosecution should have done its due diligence before walking into a case that wasn’t winnable because the left demanded its pound of flesh.
Then as now, the media didn’t care about the shooting or the victims. They cared about the narrative, which must be served at all costs. If this “mass shooting” was the result of a verbal altercation that got out of hand, then gun control laws could have stopped this. Never mind if the guns that were used were obtained by the individuals legally. More restrictive laws will always solve everything, until the Second Amendment is done away with and guns are banned entirely. And then, when this happens, it’ll be because we ever had the Second Amendment to begin with.
There will always be a narrative to fall back upon when it comes to guns and the media. It’ll never be simply the facts, and heaven forbid we ask the media to just do their job.
