Michigan State University will remain closed for two days as it recovers from a horrific mass shooting last night. Anthony McRae shot and killed three people last night and wounded an additional five. He remained at large before being found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. There will be calls for gun control, but there will be a defined shelf life on the coverage since McRae doesn’t check enough boxes for this to be a sustained media effort. First, he’s not white; he’s black—a detail that CNN omitted. Like the two separate mass shootings in California around the time of the Lunar New Year that two Asian men committed, this horrific event will fade, too. If the shooter isn’t white and using an AR-15 rifle, it’s not national news. It’s a local news story.
We’ll keep talking about this story because the media intentionally buries it since it doesn’t fit their narrative. Second, it seems like progressive politics played a part in McRae obtaining the firearm in this shooting. In 2019, he was pinched on some gun charges that a soft-on-crime prosecutor dropped. To make matters worse, this prosecuting attorney had a policy not to push too hard on gun charges where those involved were people of color. Oh, and of course, this attorney had ties to George Soros. If McRae had been charged as any other person caught illegally carrying a concealed firearm without a permit, the shooting at MSU might not have happened. The Washington Free Beacon has more:
The Michigan State University shooter had felony gun charges dismissed by a progressive prosecutor.
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) February 14, 2023
Had the charges not been dismissed, he would have been barred from owning a firearm at the time of the shooting.
Via @jchristenson_ https://t.co/qel9R2bzZS
Anthony McRae was charged in June 2019 with illegally carrying a concealed handgun without a permit, but later had those charges dismissed by the office of Ingham County district attorney Carol Siemon (D.). Her office instead let McRae plead guilty to a lesser misdemeanor gun charge, and he served a little more than a year on probation, which ended May 2021. He initially faced up to five years in prison for the felony charge, the Detroit News reported.
Siemon retired from the district attorney’s office at the start of this year after facing criticism from judges and law enforcement officials for her soft-on-crime policies. The same year that McRae was released, Ingham County sheriff Scott Wriggelsworth pushed East Lansing’s city council "to reconsider her internal felony firearm charging policy," which he said "does not hold people properly criminally accountable, and increases the likelihood of additional gun violence."
Siemon made it her office’s official policy in August 2021 to drop mandatory prison sentences for felony firearms charges. She said the sentencing enhancement led to "dramatic racial inequity" and was "not in any way linked to the goal that we share of keeping the public safe."
Siemon is part of George Soros’s vast public safety network. She has participated in international criminal justice reform junkets with other "reform-minded" prosecutors like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner (D.), Chicago’s Kim Foxx (D.), and Los Angeles’s George Gascón. She also backed radical San Francisco prosecutor Chesa Boudin (D.) ahead of a recall campaign that eventually ousted him from office last year.
Julio added today that McRae was known to authorities. Once again, the shooter was known and tragedy could’ve been prevented not through new gun control laws but by prosecuting attorneys doing their jobs and enforcing the laws already on the books.