Another White Supremacist Goes on Mass Shooting Rampage

I am trying to make more of a point of keeping things light on the weekends, and perhaps on holidays, as much to reduce my own stress as anything else. To take a break from the excesses of a world that, often times, feels like it is spinning out of control. And yesterday, I kept that tradition going, mostly, in the morning.  

Then, there was a very unfortunate, tragic news story that broke in western Texas, and that altered my plans for a lighthearted weekend.  

Last week, unfortunately, headlines were – for a while, at least – dominated by an all too common occurrence in the United States. It was about a rightwing extremist and white supremacist who decided to go to a public event in his town – a music and food festival that had become a tradition spanning numerous decades for the town – and he snuck into the grounds, crossing a stream and cutting a fence, and then went on a mass shooting rampage. He was killed, but not before he ended three lives, including those belonging to two children.  

Now, this weekend, we have yet another mass shooting conducted by a white supremacist who apparently did not approve of what he apparently referred to as “race mixing.” And yes, he is a Trump supporter.

As I mentioned last week in the aftermath of the mass shooting then, the names and locations and specific details change. But the fact that we here in this country have far too many mass shootings, and particularly those ones conducted by racist white supremacists, has not changed at all.   

Last week, it was at a food and music festival in northern California, not far from San Jose. This time, it was at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, which has been ranked as one of the safest major cities in the United States. According to the latest news report as I write this, 20 people are dead from the attack, and 26 more are injured.  

The shooter’s name, which I will mention here only this one time, is Patrick Crusius. He is from a different part of Texas, a resident of Allen, Texas, which is a suburb of Dallas, nearly 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) away from El Paso. Apparently, he may have gone there because there would be more immigrants. He was apprehended by the local police, and apparently, without further incident. According to reports on CNN, the police are not merely going to seek to prosecute this as a hate crime, but as an act of domestic terror.  

Like so many other white supremacist mass shooters before him, he apparently left behind a racist manifesto that he had written before he went on his shooting spree at the Walmart in the Cielo Vista Mall in El Paso. He wrote that he was very nervous, and expected to die. He blamed technology and immigration for denying him the standard of living that he expected to enjoy.   

There are plenty of questions, as there always are after such senseless and mindless acts of mass violence. Why did he drive so far out of his way – six hours, evidently – in order to commit this crime? Also, will there be a time in this country when we truly recognize how horrific and unusual it is that these mass shootings keep happening here, and that we are the only supposedly peacetime country in the world that has this many random mass shootings?   

Also, the shooter was a Trump supporter, which might not be a minor point. We know this, as it was revealed that he had tweeted in the past his support for Trump and the border wall. To what extent did he identify with Trump, and was he as driven to rage as some other Trump supporting perpetrators of hate crimes have been? It should be noted that this is the second deadliest mass shooting in Texas history, and the deadliest also happened during the Trump years. This is the eighth deadliest mass shooting in the modern history of the United States, but it is the second deadliest mass shooting in Texas, and both happened since Trump took office. The deadliest modern mass shooting in history, in Las Vegas, also happened since Trump became president. Is this somehow unrelated, or just by chance? Or it there a reason that these kinds of incidents are happening now, at a time when we have someone in the Oval Office who is as polarizing as Trump has clearly been accused by many around the world for being?  

Very quickly, there was footage of the shooting, taken from both the parking lot just outside of the Walmart, as well as inside of the store during the actual shooting. There is video of a man who had crawled under what appears to be the store shelves, and the rapid fire from the rifle that this man used can be clearly heard in the audio. Is this also part of the problem, having live video from these mass shooting events, as we did with this Walmart shooting, or the Las Vegas shooting from a few years back? Also, the fact that we have news that explore in depth the possible motivations of mass shooters like this, and often make these shooters almost household names, would that not appear to be more than a small part of the problem here?   

I will not, for now, get into the whole gun debate, having voiced my opinions before. But I will ask when an appropriate time will come, because too often, people will claim that it is too soon after another major mass shooting to discuss such matters. But we never seem to go too long between major mass shootings.   

Once again, I express my sympathy with the victims of this shooting, as well as to the families who were impacted. Also again, I feel both sad and angry at the sense of powerlessness, and more than a little frustrated at the collective indifference of far too many of my fellow countrymen, who seem to accept these absurd and senseless acts of mass violence as the “new normal” in this country, even though there is absolutely nothing normal about this. This kind of thing does not happen with anywhere near the frequency that it continually, relentlessly happens here, within the borders of the United States. I think it is well past the time that we get serious about examining why, exactly, that is.




El Paso Shooter Identified Online As Trump Supporter Who Didn’t Like ‘Race Mixing’  Patrick Crusius allegedly left behind a racist manifesto before killing at least 15 people at Cielo Vista Mall., by NewsOne Staff, August 2, 2019: 


https://newsone.com/3883517/el-paso-shooter-patrick-crusius/

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