Yes, the killings do. But what I'm talking about is reaction. Public reaction.

(Almost always when I talk about things, I talk about public reaction, as I was doing on my last entry, about the racehorse Barbados's recovery.)

Ask yourself how much news there'd be if two such crimes, racially-motivated, had happened in quick succession?

Ask yourself what kinds of news headlines you'd be seeing on CNN and elsewhere had there been two killings by parents of gay children within weeks of each other?

And then ask yourself about the news you've gotten about these two killings.

There's not much. Local stories, all of them. No national news at all that I was able to find.

Perhaps it's too soon yet to hear reaction -- although had the killings been racially or gay related, you can bet your booties there'd be reaction already. Reaction within hours, in today's fast-moving media world.

When reaction to the autism killings does come in the national media -- if it does come -- it will be surprising if much of it does not take the form of looking into the problems the parents faced in having to deal with an autistic child.

Let me be clear here: This blog entry is not about whether parents of autistic offspring do or do not have adequate "supports." I am not discussing whether or not those charged with murder faced "stress." A case can no doubt be made that anyone who murders is in some way "stressed," right? But the focus generally isn't on supporting the murderer, is it?

I find it curious, to put it mildly, that national news media have not picked up on these stories. Perhaps they can't find any group to condemn the murders of autistic people. Could that be the case? Or are they not trying very hard?

I'm sad to say that I was suprised to see Peoria Journal-Star columnist Phil Luciano's article 'This was not about autism' -- sad that I found it unusual. The headline is a quote from Katie McCarron's grandfather.

It's unusual to find a piece like this, a piece that doesn't say it's "understandable" that the parent "broke"; "snapped"; "couldn't take it any more." For that is the usual way cases like this play out in the media. It is a tribute to Luciano that he did this column. (Update: Actually, as Steve Drake points out in his comment below, what I didn't know when I wrote this sentence was that Luciano himself wrote earlier columns doing the very thing I'm condemning. See my next post about that.)

It is a sign of how far yet we have to go that Luciano, so far, seems to have the field all to himself.