The Mass Murders That Dare Not Speak Their Name

By Jack Cashill

Pity the late Cedric Ford. If he had understood the way the media worked, he might not have gone on the horrific shooting spree in central Kansas on Thursday that cost three people their lives and fourteen people their health. But alas, once the major media understood the demographics of the case, they lost interest in Ford quicker than you could say “Muhammad and Malvo.”

Ford simply did not fit the narrative. “Who commits mass shootings?” read the headline of an all too typical piece on CNN.com some months ago. CNN’s answer: the “young, white and male.” At 38, Ford was relatively young, and he was certainly male, but he was not white. Ford, in fact, represents the most recent manifestation of a widely underreported phenomenon -- the black mass murderer. As in virtually every other case, Ford’s blackness was not an incidental detail. It was at the heart of why he did what he did.......

J.C.X. Simon died an unheralded death in a California prison cell. Never heard of him? Forty years earlier, the openly racist Simon and his fellow “zebra killers” shot at least twenty-one whites and Asians in San Francisco, including a future mayor of that disturbed city, and killed fourteen of them. The Bay Area’s Zodiac Killer murdered half as many people in that same era and got ten times the attention, including a feature film just a few years ago.........

Save perhaps for Charles Manson, no mass murderer in American history caused as much widespread panic as John Allen Muhammad. Remember him? In October 2002, he and his young ward Lee Malvo decided to shut down the nation’s capital. According to Malvo, Muhammad planned to “terrorize” the area by killing six whites a day for thirty days. He was particularly keen on shooting pregnant white women.......

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