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Did you hear about the fatal shooting on Wednesday? The one in Oklahoma City. No? What about the one in Indianapolis? Or the one in Seattle? Or in Louisville? No?

We can’t blame you. After all, this kind of thing happens every day across the nation. And, unless you watch local news or are related to one of the dozens of Americans who get injured or killed by gun violence each day, chances are that you are completely unaware of the shooting closest to you.

What is likely, however, is that the vast majority of these shootings won’t cause Republicans to take any kind of action to address this scourge (apart from offering thoughts and prayers, of course).

They won’t back laws aiming to keep deadly weapons out of the hands of those most likely to use them, such as domestic abusers or people with mental illnesses. And they certainly have no interest in passing legislation that might reduce gun violence by creating opportunities for young men disillusioned by a system that makes a life of crime seem like their best option to get ahead.

In fact, in most cases, Republicans would prefer it if you didn’t know about how many people are shot and killed each day in the United States because it would make their refusal to do anything about gun violence look reckless and foolish.

Unless, of course, they can exploit one of these tragedies to advance their own agenda, which brings us to the one fatal shooting from Wednesday that you did hear about: the ambush of two National Guardsmen in Washington, DC, which resulted in the death of 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom and life-threatening injuries sustained by 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe.

And there is no doubt that it is a tragedy.

Arguably, Beckstrom and Wolfe should not have been there on Wednesday. But Donald Trump wanted a military presence in the nation’s capital, West Virginia’s governor eagerly complied to score political points, and that’s how they found themselves patrolling the streets near the White House on Wednesday.

Without speculating too much, it is also quite possible that the president’s policies brought not only the victims to the scene of the crime but the alleged shooter as well.

On November 21, his administration issued a memo calling for the review of the cases of all refugees who entered the United States during Joe Biden’s presidency.

And it appears as though that would include that of Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the 29-year-old Afghan man suspected of pulling the trigger, whose asylum request was reportedly granted in April of this year.

That’s not to say that Trump is to blame for the shooting itself. However, he keeps creating potentially explosive situations across the country that he then tries to take advantage of when something bad happens.

Just as he did in this case.

The president wasted little time to use the shooting as a justification to halt migration from “all Third World countries.”

And, as you may recall, the only reason why the National Guard was deployed in the first place was the attempted carjacking and beating of a former DOGE staffer.

As we pointed out at the time, Trump and the GOP often use this “anecdoteization” of politics.

Here is how it works: They take an isolated incident (or a handful of them) that supports a certain narrative, and then they pretend it is indicative of a widespread problem and craft policies to address this imaginary issue.

For example, Trump’s entire immigration policy is built around the myth that “illegals” are vicious criminals, even though research shows that the opposite is true.

In fact, anecdotal “evidence” serves Republicans as an excuse to push through much of their agenda.

“Welfare queens” are abusing food assistance programs? Let’s cut benefits for millions of Americans. Slacker kids are playing video games in their parents’ basements? Time to slash billions from Medicaid. A noncitizen tried to register to vote? Let’s get rid of mail-in voting and impose other draconian measures that suppress voter turnout among Democratic constituencies. One asylum seeker committed a crime? Let’s halt all immigration from nonwhite countries.

It goes without saying that all of these are things Trump and the GOP want to do. They just need a pretext.

And crime has always served authoritarian regimes as the perfect justification to push through policies that might otherwise be unpopular.

But not just any crime will do. In order to serve as an excuse, the perpetrator and the victim have to meet certain criteria.

For example, Republicans only care about gun violence if it happens in urban areas and if the shooter is not white (and preferably an undocumented immigrant, a Muslim, or a Black male with a preexisting mugshot and, ideally, facial tattoos).

They care even more if the victim is a blonde sorority girl. In that case, you can expect nonstop coverage on Fox News and endless outrage from GOP lawmakers with urgent calls for action (which never include any type of gun control).

Or members of the National Guard.

That brings us to the role of corporate news outlets, which are complicit in this. And it’s not just the right-wing media, although Fox et al. are driving these narratives and everybody else just follows along.

Obviously, we’re not saying that this should not have been a story. But with dozens of deadly shootings happening across the country on a daily basis, does this one merit wall-to-wall coverage for days, especially when it became clear that this tragedy would be exploited by Trump?

And keep in mind that this was the top story even before Beckstrom died.

At the very least, responsible news organizations owe it to their audiences to put this crime into context, e.g., by pointing out why the National Guard was in DC. It’s also worth mentioning that Lakanwal was a product of the war on terror.

He was five years old when the US invaded Afghanistan, which means that all he has known is war. In addition, while the administration is trying to make him out to be some kind of sleeper, he worked in a CIA-backed paramilitary organization known as a “zero unit.”

Again, this is not to excuse his alleged crime, but this is information an informed audience needs to have. Instead, too many news outlets just parroted the lies and propaganda from Trump administration officials, especially in the early hours after the shooting when real information was sparse.

Journalists have to do better.

The president and the GOP are following a very well-known playbook, and the media’s job isn’t to make it easier for them to do so.

Of course, it would be good if policy decisions were guided by science, data, and facts instead of hype or the whims of the president, but this is clearly not something we should ever expect from Trump.

That is why the least that journalists can do is to provide context instead of just amplifying the narrative that he is trying to sell.

And if they wanted to cover every deadly shooting as extensively as this one, to show Americans what the problem of gun violence actually looks like, that would be even better.