THE beginning of this month was shattered internationally with the October 1stmassacre of 59 people by Stephen Paddock.  Firing from a hotel room on a country music concert, Paddock would also injure an estimated 489 people using a small arsenal of high-powered rifles he had accumulated.  As happens in the wake of such tragedies, the perpetual debate on American gun control flared up, and has predictably died down, with hundreds of hours of collective coverage and analyses with regard to the motivation of the shooter and analysis of how he was able to gather such a large cache of weapons.

The fervour with which the Second Amendment  to the U.S. Constitution was debated just weeks ago has already given way to less abstract fare, the lens shifting to the personalities of those who survived and away from the policy-makers upon whom responsibility for the enabling environment rests.

Do a Google search of “Las Vegas shooting” and stories from CNN, Rolling Stone, and Fox News head the list, most featuring a security guard, Jesus Campos, who was initially listed as missing after the massacre.  Even the late-night talk show hosts, the new vanguard of analysis of American affairs, have shifted their gaze back to the gaffes emerging from the Trump White House, from his stance on Puerto Rico disaster relief, to his ongoing battle with his own Republican party, to his bungling of messages of condolences to the families of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan two weeks ago.

Speaking of American military, involvement on foreign soil, do a Google search of “Mogadishu”, and there are no articles from CNN, Rolling Stone or Fox News at the top of the search.  Instead, what you’ll find are articles from the UK outlets The Guardian, The Independent, and the BBC, all on another tragedy, one that also involves a lone perpetrator who did not survive the incident– a man who exploded two truck bombs in a crowded area in the Somali capital last Saturday, killing an estimated 320 people, or more than five times the casualties in the Vegas incident.

The UK outlets and Al Jazeera have been reporting extensively on the story, with responsibility for the bombing being laid at the feet of al-Shabaab, a fundamentalist group currently involved in an ongoing war against the Somali government.  Unlike a January bombing that killed around seven people, al-Shabaab has not claimed responsibility.

Within the reporting of the incident has been that it most likely was a revenge attack for the killing of several civilians in the town of Bariire, back in August. The original Al Jazeera report is painful to read:

“At least 10 civilians, including three children, have been killed in a joint raid by Somali forces and U.S. troops in the country’s south, local officials said. The attack, which took place in the early hours of Friday, targeted a farm on the outskirts of the town of Bariire in the southern Lower Shabelle region.

‘These local farmers were attacked by foreign troops while looking after their crops,’ regional Deputy Governor Ali Nur Mohamed told reporters in the capital Mogadishu.

‘The troops could have arrested them because they were unarmed, but instead shot them one by one mercilessly.’

Three children, aged eight to 10, and a woman were among the dead, Mohamed said.”

According to reports, the suspected bomber in the recent attack was a former soldier from the Bariire township, and the vehicles were sourced from there as well.  The Al Jazeera report notes that there has been an escalation of attempts to eradicate al-Shabab, backed by what was said to be an increasing U.S. footprint in the country.

This might go a long way in explaining the curious absence of U.S. media entities in the top reporting on the attack on Mogadishu.  In this instance, what we have is a complex interplay of questionable foreign policy and the apparent complicity of a media which credibility is constantly under attack from the head of the administration responsible for that foreign policy in downplaying its potential role in this tragedy.

In the aftermath of such catastrophe, the argument is often made that it is unhelpful to draw comparisons or to attribute political dimensions to their existence.  The danger with this outlook is that often when the dust settles, and the dead are buried, the focus is shifted away from the exploration of the root causes and the farther away from the presumed polar centre of the world, the more quickly the concern dissipates.    The root causes, however, remain, whether it is an absurdly outsized resistance to reasonable gun control resulting in the worst mass shooting in contemporary American history, or whether it is a poorly executed war on terror filled with civilian casualties resulting in the deadliest terrorist attack in Somali history.  Whether it is Las Vegas, or Mogadishu, ignoring and confronting the enabling root causes of such catastrophic violence does nothing to solve the problem or prevent the next benchmark in what is considered worst or deadliest.