Yet Another White Supremacist Instigates Yet Another Hateful Mass Shooting

It’s morning again in America, and we have yet another high profile mass shooting. The dates, locations, and specific circumstances always seem to change. The general rampages of violence, however, and the inaction that they are met with, basically never do. And one other thing does not seem to change: these kinds of events rarely ever seem to occur in other advanced and peacetime nations, while they have become the new norm here in the United States. It is hard not to ask the question of why that is, but apparently, millions of people manage not to seriously ever dissect the problem.  This one could have been far worse, if not for the very fast response time by local law enforcement, who fatally shot the mass shooter before the possibility that the shooting could have gotten much, much worse. Still, three are dead, not including the shooter, and two of the dead are children. One of them was a 6-year old boy, Stephen Romero. The other was a 13-year old girl, Keyla Salazar. Both of them were from nearby San Jose. The other victim was Trevor Irby, 25, who lived in Romulus, New York.  There were 12 other people who were wounded in the rampage.              

The local police officers started shooting at the gunman in less than one minute, and managed to kill the gunman quickly thereafter. Gilroy Police Chief Scot Smithee was very thankful for the quick response time, saying that it averted what might have been a far worse situation, given how many people were crowded into a relatively small place:   

“We had thousands of people there in a very small area,” he said, his eyes tearing up. 

“It could have gotten so much worse, so fast. I’m really proud that they got there as quickly as they did. There absolutely would have been more bloodshed.”         

The shooter’s name is Santino William Legan, a local 19-year old resident of Gilroy, California, where the Garlic Festival was taking place, and where the man – let us remember that he was, legally, already a man, and not a boy – decided to go on his deadly rampage.              

The festival did have security, but Legan was able to get past that by going in the back, crossing a creek, and then cut through a fence before gaining entry into the grounds of the festival, where he began his rampage.              

Legan used what was described as a military-style semiautomatic rifle in the attack, and this poses a problem that, to me, seems so obvious, but which seems to conveniently escape gun rights activists when they suggest that states with more restrictive gun laws often have very high gun violence despite the laws. The gun that he used was purchased in nearby Nevada earlier this month, a neighboring state which is not difficult to get to for most Californians, especially those with a car.       

California Governor Gavin Newsome addressed this rather obvious issue and explained his own frustration and sense of powerlessness:    

“You can’t put borders up, speaking of borders, to a neighboring state where you can buy this damn stuff legally. How in the hell is that possible?” Newsom told reporters at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. “I have no problem with the Second Amendment, you have a right to bear arms but not weapons of goddamned mass destruction.”              

It was discovered that Legan had also read and discussed some far right extremist literature, and had posted something about a white supremacist manifesto on his Instagram account earlier in the day. According to an article by Ben Collins of NBC News (see link below), this material has been pirated and spread for free on far-right websites, and “strongly advocates combat, violence and death along racial lines, and is filled with anti-Semitic rhetoric. It is a staple among neo-Nazis and white supremacists on extremist sites.”              

Of course, we have a man in the Oval Office who officially has denied that racism is a real problem in this country, even though he himself has been accused of harboring racist sentiment and making very racist statements. Many acknowledge that there has been a marked and undeniable spike in hate crimes since the political rise of Trump to the White House in the 2016 election.              

My sympathy goes out to the victims and their families, as well as the innocent people scarred by these events, including those who attended the event, and the shaken local residents of Gilroy.              

Of course, anytime that you talk about the problem of so many mass shootings here in the United States, and ask why this is so common place here in the aftermath of yet another mass shooting, you open yourself up to criticism that you are “politicking” the tragedy. One of the problems, however, is that we seem to have so many such incidents, that there are rare instances when there has not been a mass shooting on some scale or other for any significant length of time. That is the sad truth.  

So, at the risk of so doing, I will say again, just a couple of days after this latest shooting, what I have said before: we have a serious problem in this country. And yes, it is unique to this country, specifically. Sure, there may be some countries out there with perhaps worse gun violence than we have. But generally, these are countries that have been disabled by incredible instability, or which are torn by war. Yes, there are African and Asian nations which have incredible gang violence, and where horrible things happen.  

But again, the undeniable fact is that the United States stands alone as the only advanced nation with such a huge, glaring problem with gun violence, and it is the only nation in the world which experiences such a staggering number of seemingly random mass shootings.  

Until we are able to be honest with this problem, which like so many other huge problems in this country, seems to boil down to a “for profit” industry (this one the gun industry and, specifically, the NRA), then we cannot hope to actually resolve it anytime soon. And while it may be morning again in America, it sometimes feels like there has been a very real darkness that has descended and which has hovered over the country now for entirely too long. Given where we are, the political realities of these time, we clearly are still waiting for the morning of reason and rationality to dawn again in America.

Police ID Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting suspect as Santino William Legan; victims include 2 children by Ruben Vives, Matthew Ormseth, Laura J. Nelson, Hannah Fry, and Richard Winton, writing for The Los Angeles Times, JULY 29, 2019:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-07-29/gilroy-garlic-festival

Instagram account connected to Gilroy shooter pushed staple of white supremacist internet forums The material is part of a years-long recruiting technique by white nationalists to target those vulnerable to their message on forums frequently populated by teenagers. By Ben Collins, July 29, 2019:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/instagram-account-connected-gilroy-shooter-pushed-staple-white-supremacist-internet-n1035926