Just like Fox News has spent more time focused on “looting” than mass shootings, so will the Republicans when they take over the House of Representatives in January.

You’re not likely to die or be seriously wounded by looters during a normal day grocery shopping, at school or at work, but Republicans would rather more Americans die than do anything to restrict access to guns.

As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump suggests, that was made clear during Chuck Todd’s interview with Rep. James Comer (R-KY) on Meet The Press on Sunday. Comer is the likely next chair of the House Oversight Committee.

After falsely insisting that places with the strictest gun laws have the highest rates of crimes committed with guns, Comer said the GOP House will be more interested in looting than shootings.

COMER: We’re going to continue to protect our Second Amendment rights but while at the same time, we want to get serious about crime in America, the fentanyl crisis, as well as the looting that’s taking place in cities.

Bump provides good evidence that Comer’s and the GOP’s preferred focus for looting over mass shootings can be traced to Fox News (my emphases added):

The idea that U.S. cities are riddled with looters is almost entirely a function of the right-wing media and Fox News. Yes, looting has occurred. Fox News is happy to show examples of it occurring. It’s worth noting that the network has mentioned “looters” or “looting” in nearly 400 chunks of airtime this year, more than three times as often as has CNN or MSNBC — a number of times that might well match the actual number of looting incidents on a 1-to-1 basis. (Again, we don’t have a lot of data on “looting” as a crime.)

Fox News has covered looting so often because it is a particularly visceral (and non-bloody) iteration of its incessant “crime is out of control” narrative coming into the midterm elections. Shortly before the election, we looked at how Fox News’s coverage of crime had surged in late September relative to the first six months of the year, an increase that was not linked to any obvious increase in crime at that same point. Continuing the analysis into this month, we see that mentions of crime on the network completely collapsed in the second third of this month — after the election was over.

…

In 2021 and 2022, Fox News has mentioned “looters” or “looting” in 40 percent more chunks of airtime than it has “mass shooting.” No wonder a prominent Republican sees the former as a more urgent focus of attention. Apparently looting isn’t simply an unaddressable function of mental illness.

What Bump didn’t say is that looting is also right-wing code for “Blacks Behaving Badly.” That fits right in with the Murdochs’ network’s orthodoxy, too.

You can watch Comer signal that Fox News will have a prominent place in the GOP House below, from the November 27, 2022 Meet The Press.