NPI's Cascadia Advocate

Offering commentary and analysis from Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's uplifting perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Monday, April 22nd, 2013

The anatomy of a headline: Some stories on Federal Way tragedy imply it’s part of Seattle

Last night’s dead­ly ram­page in Fed­er­al Way — which result­ed in the deaths of five indi­vid­u­als at the Pinewood Vil­lage apart­ments com­plex just off Pacif­ic High­way South — has focused nation­al and inter­na­tion­al atten­tion on our region.

Although the tragedy occurred in Fed­er­al Way and author­i­ties there are han­dling the inves­ti­ga­tion, sev­er­al nation­al and inter­na­tion­al media out­lets are incor­rect­ly char­ac­ter­iz­ing the event as a “Seat­tle shoot­ing” or a shoot­ing in Seat­tle, imply­ing that it hap­pened in our region’s biggest city. In fact, the Fed­er­al Way city lim­its are some twen­ty miles south of the heart of Seat­tle, and dri­ving from one city hall to anoth­er takes twen­ty-five min­utes… in good traffic.

A quick check of sto­ries per­tain­ing to the tragedy on Bing News revealed some head­lines that are mis­lead­ing and could have been bet­ter written.

Let’s com­pare a few:

Our own local media, of course, don’t need to say “Seat­tle area”. We here in Wash­ing­ton know where Fed­er­al Way is.

There are a lot of details about this tragedy we still don’t know. We do know that the man killed by police last night — who is sus­pect­ed of killing the oth­ers — had a license to car­ry a con­cealed weapon. And he was abu­sive: Law enforce­ment knew this guy, because he’d been vio­lent before. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, he was armed last night, and he did ter­ri­ble dam­age with his weapons.

We at NPI extend our deep­est con­do­lences to the fam­i­lies and friends of those killed in this sense­less act of vio­lence. Anoth­er mass shoot­ing has result­ed in more death and destruc­tion. We’re left to won­der: When is enough enough? When are we going to put human rights ahead of “gun rights”?

Written by Andrew Villeneuve :: 12:19 PM

Categories: Civil Liberties, Policy Topics, Public Planning

Tags: ,

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One Comment

  1. It’s sim­i­lar to events in Water­town MA being char­ac­ter­ized as being in Boston.

    # by Mike Barer :: April 22nd, 2013 at 1:22 PM

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