Montini: Murdered TV pair were special, but not unusual

The shooting deaths of a television news reporter and photographer will make news all over the country because it was so unusual and because those of us in the media look out for our own.

Wait...no. That’s not entirely true.

The fact that reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward were in the media played a big part in the enormous amount of coverage their murders received.

But what happened to them was not unusual.

Not at all.

According to the non-profit Gun Violence Archive, there have been over 8,500 gun deaths in the United States so far this year, along with more than 17,000 injuries.

The number of mass shootings in that time, which used to shock us but have become grotesquely accepted, is 219.

In the past 72 hours (as I write this) there have been dozens of incidents and several firearms-related murders.

Parker’s boyfriend said he hopes that Parker’s loss will lead to a reasonable discussion about gun law reform.

Chris Hurst told CNN, "There needs to be some action that is taken out of an event like this -- out of an event like Sandy Hook, like Charleston, like Aurora, Colorado... where these things just don't occur anymore. We need to have a substantive conversation on what is going on in America that is allowing evil to continue to crop up over love? Is it because we are in the media? And the attacker knew this was going to get a lot of play, and here we are again, another mushroom cloud of coverage over gun violence?”

The dead woman’s father, only hours after his daughter was killed, told Fox News, "Everybody that she touched loved her, and she loved everybody back. I'm not going to let this issue drop. We've got to do something about crazy people getting guns.”

He later appealed to President Obama, telling the BBC, “Mr. President you need to do this. Please do it. Please do it for us and for other people so they’re not going to lose their Alisons and their Adams.”

For his part, the president said, “What we know is that the number of people who die from gun-related incidents around this country dwarfs any deaths that happen through terrorism.”

Imagine the outrage -- and the IMMEDIATE Congressional action -- if over 8,500 Americans were killed by terrorists.

Meantime, lawmakers won’t pass even the most simple, most common sense reforms, like one requiring universal background checks on every gun sale.

Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has been working on gun reform since the massacre in Tucson. The parents of the children murdered in Newtown have done the same thing. So, too, have the friends and families of those killed in the mass shooting in a Colorado movie theater.

It goes on and on.

What happened to Alison Parker and Adam Ward got a lot of attention in part because they were members of the media.

They were special people. But the horrible truth is, their murders were not unusual.

At all.