Gunfire on Bloomington’s Harriet Avenue early October 6 left nearly 100 casings and one minor hurt, and no one was arrested. Police tied it to Somali-American gang activity, and Fox News headlined it a ‘Somali gang gun battle’. Read the headline as a sentence. Its subject is “Somali gang gun battle”: a nationality, a crime and a war word fused into one noun, with a whole state as the object. No person fires in it. At least two people did, on surveillance video, and none has been named or arrested. The label began with Bloomington’s police chief, and FOX 9 and KSTP headlined it “Somali gang-related”. Fox drops the “related”, and a link becomes an identity. The tell: a people named where a few people acted. The page says less than its headline. Fox’s own story counts “nearly 100 casings”, never mentions the one injured minor, and reaches the Bloomington firefight only in its 16th paragraph, where the suspects “remained at large”. The sheriff who warns is Bob Fletcher of Ramsey County, anchored by St. Paul; Bloomington sits in Hennepin County. His trouble was a forecast. Bloomington’s chief described kids with legal guns and “social media beef”. No headline in this set gives a crime figure to measure any of it against. Across one day the word travels. Local headlines said “gang-related”. Fox said “Somali gang gun battle”, the Daily Mail “Somali gang chaos”, and Breitbart “Somali Democrat Mayor”, fixed on St. Louis Park’s Nadia Mohamed. That is Essentialization: the ethnic word moves from shooters to a politician and picks up a party. The savior stands beside it, a sheriff counting “50 kids in this 300” who “need to go to jail”. Fear is the hunger fed, 27 days before the midterms, and it is useful to anyone on a ballot promising to end it.
