You might have missed it.

Last week an 18-year-old Bosnian immigrant, his pockets loaded with ammunition, shot and killed five people and wounded four more at Salt Lake City’s Trolly Square Mall. An off-duty policeman named Kenneth K. Hammond was taking his wife to an early Valentine’s Day dinner when he stopped further massacre by pulling his concealed weapon and shooting the Bosnian dead.

A psychologist from Vanderbilt University suggested that American society had not allowed the lad to be truly himself because it marginalized his native culture, thus creating resentment that led to the killing spree. Salt Lake’s Mayor quickly assured the city’s Bosnian immigrants that his administration would crack down on insensitive subordinates who suggested a link between the misunderstood youth and the supposed hate-America rhetoric preached from mosques and perhaps circulating among the Bosnian community. The FBI, echoing the Bureau’s past edicts on lone Muslim rampages, said there were no terrorist motives involved in the latest slaughter. Finally, most national news outlets gave only cursory coverage to the story and largely ignored the heroics of Officer Hammond.

Overlooking Officer Hammond was partially due to the popular media's priority of filling in the public on the sordid details surrounding the death of Anna Nicole Smith. But there is a more pervasive underlying factor at work in even the most staid and respectable newsrooms. Long standing editorial policies consciously censor "good gun" stories. These would be any of the approximately 50,000 yearly incidents in which a citizen pulls a firearm to save his life and/or the lives of others, prevents rape or protects property.

On a happier front was the news ignored a month earlier when McNaughton’s Comet, named for its Australian discoverer, became visible to the naked eye. For about two weeks it kept close to the Western horizon and swept wondrously from Northern to Southern Hemispheres. As photographer Keri Scaggs put it, “God winked, but most people weren’t paying attention.”

Keri likes to hunt and doesn't borrow a gun for it, but regardless of how politically incorrect that may be, she meant that God winked in a friendly, non-threatening and possibly even amused way.

I find myself wondering about a peculiar meaning for wink as used in telecommunications to denote the interruption of a signal. That usually is considered a bad thing, but it could be a friendly wake-up call that something is broken, like a whole nation with its collective eyes turned from heaven and fixed on news media for information, and its hopes pinned to government for protection.

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I've linked to my novel Something in Common, the opening chapter of which offers an R rated description of the background that brings a fictional Bosnian to our shores. He is a non-Muslim, a titular Christian, a sociopathic creep. By offering the link here, I hope I allay fears that I may be biased against a particular group from that human abattoir that used to be Tito's Yugoslavia.