PATTERNS OF FACT
One of the reasons the debate over media bias never seems to go anywhere is that a disbelief in that bias is a constitutive feature of the bias itself. Journalists don't know they're biased just as fish don't know they're wet. As a result, it sometimes takes the explicitly conservative press to point out what ought to be blindingly obvious. In the case of the killings in Ft. Worth on Wednesday night, what's obvious is that while they certainly fit a pattern of multiple-victim gun homicides by white males, they also fit a pattern of anti-religious violence. Like the killers at Columbine, Larry Gene Ashbrook made anti-religious statements as he killed; like the gunman at West Paducah, he targeted teenagers at worship.

All the evidence is there in the solid reporting in today's New York Times and Washington Post, yet this point never comes into focus. The intellectual life, such as it was, of the Unabomer and the abortionist-shooters and the gay-bashers has been lavishly analyzed, contextualized, deconstructed. The anti-religious sentiments of killers are, at best, noted in passing. The reason is that the press cannot fathom that there is such a thing as anti-religious, and especially anti-Christian, bigotry in the land-not least because the press has a mild bias in that direction itself. (Even anti-Semitism gets little ink when it's directed specifically against observant Jews, such as the six Orthodox Jews recently shot in Chicago while walking home from services.)

Liberals think that Christian complaints of bigotry, in an overwhelmingly Christian country, are whining, an identity politics of the Right. And they certainly can be: Christian conservatives participate in the broader culture and are by no means immune to its cult of victimhood. It should also be remembered, as conservatives have often said, that the ideological motivation of a crime is less important than the fact of it. But the truth is that there are anti-religious subcultures; that their cultural influence is greater than their numbers would suggest; that nutcases pick up strands of the culture and twist them into even weirder shapes; and that anti-religious sentiment does have power in America: in this case, the power to kill. By all means, let us debate a ban on handguns. But when are we going to discuss this?