THURSDAY'S GRUMPS

Three headlines in today's news.

From CNN:  "A gunman killed two women inside an Indiana grocery store Wednesday night before police rushed to the scene and gunned him down."

From WNDU-TV:  "Three dead after gunman opens fire inside Martin's Super Market in Elkhart, Indiana."

From NBC:  "A knife-wielding gunman killed two people at a grocery store in Elkhart, Indiana, before
being shot by police."

WNDU is the NBC station in South Bend, Indiana, which accounts for its identifying the grocery story by name.   And factually, ithe story is correct in saying that there were three dead.  But only two of the dead were the criminal's victims; the third was the assailant himself, shot by the police.  Why should WNDU in effect exaggerate the crime?  The crime wasn't a triple murder.

NBC is much more dramatic--in an almost ludicrously confusing way.  "A knife-wielding gunman killed two people."  Did he shoot them with his knife?  But at least NBC doesn't elaborate the conclusion of the crime:  the assailant was "shot by police."

CBS dramatises the whole story, shamelessly.  The victims are identified as "two women"--that's an important marker on the titilation scale--and the scene is set:  the villain shot the women "inside an Indiana grocery store [on] Wednesday night."  Then the "police rushed to the scene and gunned him down."  Action!  Violence!  Cops and Robbers!  God bless America!   The slang--"gunned him down":  the man called Wolf Blitzer would be perfect,  saying that.  Sensation-station nonsense.

And yesterday. . . .

The New York Daily News had a headline which read, "Israeli Defense Minister Takes Shot at Kerry."

In English, shots have been with us, linguistically, for more than twelve hundred years.  The earliest shots or shoots were rapid movements of one kind or another.  And then, starting a couple of centuries later, there were shoots that grew swiftly off stalks or branches:  "off-shoots," we might say today.  By the fifteenth century we were shooting arrows--and then guns.  In the nineteenth century the English started taking figurative shots at each other--and we followed them.  Today, in the United States,  real shots taken with guns--shootings--are constant.

Some years ago I was in England with my usual summer study group of university students on an academic excursion.  One of our stops every year was the Sun Inn in Dorchester:  that's Thomas Hardy country.  In the evenings we often provided entertainment for the locals in the pub by trying to play darts--which is related to shooting, though that is not my point.

I had a student that summer--Jesse--who responded to mistakes, stupidities, bad jokes, discourtesies, and such by pointing his index finger, raising his thumb, and shooting the culprit:  bang.  One night at the Sun Inn, Jesse was playing darts, threw, and missed the board completely.  His dart stuck in the wall.  "Hey there, young fellow!" cried a voice.  "That wall's an old friend of mine!"  Everybody laughed.

Jesse looked at the man, and pointed his finger: bang.  Silence in the room.  Then the man said, "Oh.  I forgot.  You're American."

Jesse went to his room.  And he didn't shoortanything or anybody any more.

When I read the headline in the New York Daily News that said "Israeli Defense Minister Takes Shot at Kerry" I thought there had been another assassination attempt.  Most of the news from the United States seems to be about shootings--with guns--and I though this was yet another one.  I have grown accustomed to reading about metaphorical shootings in sports stories, but wasn't expecting such in the news.  The news from the United States is usually about real shootings, and I was shocked to find that this one wasn't such.

Is there a moral to the story?

                                                               Bert Hornback