Heather Mac Donald On Shaun King's 'Opportunistic Outrage'

Anger about comparatively rare white-on-black hate lets advocates ignore a far more pervasive reality.
Heather Mac Donald
Jan. 08, 2019

Anti-cop activist Shaun King says that his involvement in the campaign around the Jazmine Barnes murder was not driven by reports that a white man had killed the seven-year-old girl, who was gunned down in Houston on December 30. According to Barnes’s mother and 15-year-old sister, the white driver of a pickup truck had pulled up next to the family’s car before opening fire. The accusation set off a frenzy of hate-crime allegations and blanket coverage by the New York Times. King offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who located the suspect.

As it turned out, Jazmine Barnes was killed by two black men, who opened fire on her mother’s car because they thought that they were targeting enemies of their gang. King passed along a tip about the real killers to the Houston police, and now says that he merely “internalized the pain of the family and tried to search as if it were my own child who was killed.” Race, in other words, had nothing to do with his activism.

It’s worth remembering, though, the many other black children who have been victims of drive-by shootings without leading King to launch a national crusade.

A sampling: in March 2015, a six-year-old boy was killed in a drive-by shooting on West Florissant Avenue in St. Louis, as Black Lives Matter protesters were converging on the Ferguson, Missouri, Police Department to demand the resignation of the entire department. In August 2015, a nine-year-old girl was killed by a bullet from a drive-by shooting in Ferguson while doing her homework in her bedroom, blocks from the Black Lives Matter rioting thoroughfare. Five children were shot in Cleveland over the 2015 Fourth of July weekend. A seven-year-old boy was killed in Chicago that same weekend by a bullet intended for his father. In Cincinnati, in July 2015, a four-year-old girl was shot in the head and a six-year-old girl was left paralyzed and partially blind from two separate drive-by shootings. In Cleveland, three children five and younger were killed in September 2015, leading the black police chief to break down in tears and ask why the community only protests shootings of blacks when the perpetrator is a cop. In November 2015, a nine-year-old in Chicago was lured into an alley and killed by his father’s gang enemies; the father refused to cooperate with the police. All told, ten children under the age of ten were killed in Baltimore in 2015; twelve victims were between the age of ten and seventeen.

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