NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE J ustin Jones and Justin Pearson are back in the Tennessee legislature as if nothing happened — except between the day they took up their bullhorn and now, they’ve received about $20 million worth of favorable media coverage.

The treatment of mass shootings in the media runs in well-worn ruts where, depending on the circumstances, they end up being stories about racism, sexism, or gun control. Nothing else computes.

Shootings will also disappear from the news cycle more or less rapidly, depending on how helpful they are to a preferred narrative.

It always seemed inevitable that the coverage of the shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville — a Christian school targeted by a trans shooter — would prove challenging.

The press covered the kids and staff who were shot and killed, but there was no narrative-building around the shooter and her motives. There were even feints toward declaring “the trans community” — supposedly feeling newly threatened — a de facto casualty of the event.

Then, in a great revelation that it greeted with excitement and relief, the media found the true victims of the Tennessee shooting and its aftermath: a couple of twentysomething African-American politicians expelled from the Tennessee legislature who could be relied on to repeat all the approved lines about white supremacy and disenfranchisement.

Through a miraculous transmogrification and an intervening gun-control protest at the state capitol, a story about a trans person attacking a Christian school became a story about racism and how the South will never change.

Now, everyone could be all-in, without any reservations. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden fully embraced Representatives Jones and Pearson. They were interviewed sympathetically all over the place. There was agonized commentary about what had gone wrong in Tennessee that this terrible fate could have befallen these promising young men.

Of course, getting expelled was the best thing that could have happened to them, especially given the likelihood that they’d be quickly reinstated.

Without the expulsion, no one would have heard of them. Now they’ve joined the likes of Stacey Abrams in that exalted status of victims of ersatz racism and nonexistent disenfranchisement. This confers all the moral prestige of being a courageous champion of racial justice without any of the downside of actual oppression.

Justin Pearson, who has made himself into a cut-rate combination of MLK and Malcolm X, took advantage of his new currency with over-the-top orations that could have been drawn from monologues on MSNBC prime time.

Of course, it didn’t matter that Jones and Pearson had courted their expulsion by engaging in what was supposed to be, the day before yesterday, the gravest of offenses against our system of government — the disruption of a legislature.

Heck, Jones and Pearson could have burned the place down, and it would have been deemed “mostly peaceful.”

The news cycle will now begin to move on from Tennessee, with the narrative arc completed: These inspiring symbols of hope, briefly brought low by the forces of discrimination and authoritarianism, have triumphed over backward bigots to serve once again in an institution they contend is racist.

All’s well that ends well.