THE NARRATIVE DEMANDS THAT WE DISCUSS THE SUBWAY ATTACK AS JUST ANOTHER CRIME

Here's how The New York Times is covering today's subway attack:

A man in a worker’s vest put on a gas mask, opened a canister that filled a subway car with smoke and then opened fire, the police said Tuesday morning...

Five miles away from where a man opened fire in a subway train in Brooklyn and shot 10 people during the morning rush, the police recovered a rented U-Haul van late Tuesday afternoon that they believed had been driven by the gunman, a senior law enforcement official said....

The shooting, shortly before 8:30 a.m., ... came as the city was already struggling to cope with both a rise in shootings citywide and an increase in crime and disorder in the subway....

Here's part of a CNN report:

The incident comes amid a rise in shootings in New York over the past two years and a particular rise in violence on the subway that has become a focus of Mayor Eric Adams' administration. Transit crime, broadly, is up 68% compared to last year, numbers closer to where they were at pre-pandemic levels, according to an NYPD summary of statistics current through Sunday.

We don't know yet what the perpetrator's motive was. But if someone drives up in a U-Haul, enters the subway wearing a gas mask, releases a cloud of smoke, then starts shooting people, this is not a normal crime. It doesn't stem from the same societal changes that have led to increases in ordinary shootings and robberies and car thefts in the city this year. (The number of murders is actually down this year compared to 2021.)

Yes, crime is up -- but this was clearly planned like a terrorist act or like other mass shootings. We don't talk about 9/11 as part of the crime problem. We talk about mass shootings like the ones in Sandy Hook and Parkland as part of a gun violence problem, but not as day-to-day crime.

But the dominant narrative of violence right now is: It's out of control under Democratic mayors and a Democratic president. It's out of control after two years of pandemic-related restrictions championed by Democrats made everyone crazy. This narrative is agreed on by Breitbart and The New York Times, by Fox News and The Atlantic.

America has been full of grandiose criminals like this one for decades. No matter what happens to crime statistics, they're always with us. (And they can always get guns.) But they're not run-of-the-mill perps. We used to understand that.