Rebecca Aguilar: Racial Outrage? 

There’s an awful lot of smoke going on just now over the reporting of KDFW’s Rebecca Aguilar, as regards a 70 year old guy whose business was broken into twice, and who twice defended himself with his firearms.

The Dallas Observer, says:

Monday night, KDFW-Channel 4 ran a piece about 70-year-old James Walton, owner of Able Walton Machine & Welding in West Dallas, who, early Sunday morning, shot and killed and man trying to break into his business. What made Walton’s story so extraordinary was that it was the second time he’d killed an intruder in three weeks. As it happens, Walton also lives at his place of business.
But today you will not find the Fox4 story on the station’s Web site; there’s a page for it, but no accompanying video. (Update: It’s available here.) That’s because Rebecca Aguilar‘s piece elicited a torrent of outrage, both on local blogs (chiefly FrontBurner but also elsewhere) and from viewers who began deluging the station with angry calls Monday night and much of the day yesterday. As Trey Garrison pointed out on D‘s blog:

This is her idea of journalism? Ambushing a 70-year-old man who has been through life-and-death twice in three weeks? “Are you a trigger happy kind of person? Is that what what you wanted to do? Shoot to kill?” Good Lord, I hate the people in this field.

Well, Trey need not worry about Aguilar, at least for a while: Unfair Park has confirmed that Aguilar — who was just named one of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ Broadcast Journalists of the Year — has been indefinitely suspended, based on concerns about how Aguilar treated Walton.

I’ve seen the “interview”.  There seems to me a level of anger in this woman’s “reporting” that even the typical leftist antigun hysteria we so often find among the press didn’t explain.

So I got to thinking; what else might explain it?  Perhaps the membership in the national association of Hispanic journalists might give us a clue.  The second perpetrator who was killed, his name might also give us a clue; Raul Laureles. The first guy killed, Jimmy Gannon…may or may not have an Hispanic background as well, I don’t know, though the chances seem rather high of it. I note with some dismay, that the press didn’t bother putting any pictures of either of the perps In their online particles.
I don’t want to jump to any firm conclusions here, at least in terms of making accusations.  However, I have to tell you in all honesty that my ‘gut’ is screaming at me that there is a racial element involved with this.  It’s the only thing I can think of that would explain the outrage that this “reporter” demonstrated.

Forget the idea that the 70 year old gentleman has been faced with a life or death situation twice in the last three weeks by people who wanted to steal from him.  Forget that the people who were killed were by definition criminal , and frankly deserve everything they got and more, my suspicion is that this woman is upset, and lost her supposed “neutrality” because the perpetrators that were killed, were Hispanic.

If you think that can be a very large motivator in such matters, I give you a Geraldo Rivera as an example of such.

I see Memeorandum has a fair number of links on the subject. Also covered at Riehl World View, The Jawa Report, Captain’s Quarters, Wizbang, TBogg, Instapundit.com, Confederate Yankee, Hot Air, and FrontBurner