The shooter, identified as Patrick Crusius, reportedly drove more than 600 miles from a Dallas suburb looking for Mexicans and he found them teeming in the El Paso Walmart taking advantage of a state sales tax holiday to do their back-to-school shopping. Crusius allegedly killed 22, including 13 American citizens, eight Mexicans (most if not all of whom were in the US legally), and one German. The shooter wounded at least 24.
Before the shooting, the 21-year-old suspect apparently posted a manifesto that railed against a “Hispanic invasion” and laid out a plan to divide the US into territories based on race. He praised the Australian gunman who killed 51 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand this past March, and Crusius wrote that he feared the growing Hispanic population in Texas will soon make it a solidly Democratic state, which he argues would all but assure repeated Democratic presidential victories. Sound familiar?
“The Democrat party will own America and they know it. They have already begun the transition by pandering heavily to the Hispanic voting bloc in the 1st Democratic Debate,” the manifesto says.
Early the next morning, in Dayton, Ohio, Connor Betts, 24, showed up in an entertainment district, wearing body armor, with an AR-15-style gun with a 100-round double-drum magazine, and opened fire. Nine people, including his sister, were killed and 27 were wounded. But the motives of Betts, who was killed in a firefight with police at the scene, were unclear. He was a registered Democrat who had supported Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Antifa, a militant group that protests far-right ideology, but neither Sanders nor Warren have called for militant activity and there was no sign of violent activity before Betts started shooting, and the day before his Twitter account “liked” several tweets about the El Paso shooting .
A week earlier, in another mass shooting in Gilroy, Calif., on Sunday, July 28, a gunman with an assault weapon and a bulletproof vest apparently snuck into the Gilroy Garlic Festival by cutting through a wire fence and killing three festivalgoers and wounding 13. The shooter, Santino William Legan, 19, carried out the attack with a 75-round drum magazine and five 40-round magazines. Police say he purchased the AK-47-style semi-automatic rifle legally in Nevada but, as an assault rifle, it was banned under California law.
Trump on Aug. 5 condemned “racism, bigotry and white supremacy” in a statement about the El Paso and Dayton massacres, but the Great Misleader didn’t acknowledge how his own anti-immigration rhetoric was echoed in the El Paso shooter’s manifesto and apparently has inspired other attacks on Latinos and Muslims.
Trump started his campaign in 2016 calling for a crackdown on Mexican immigrants, saying Mexico was “not sending their best.” Mexican immigrants, he said, “are bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” In rallies held since 2017, Trump has used inflammatory words, such as “predator,” “invasion,” “aliens,” “killers,” “criminal” and “animals” more than 500 times while discussing immigration, USA Today reported after analyzing Trump’s remarks at 64 rallies since 2017.
The Gun Violence Archive, as of Aug. 12, recorded 9,094 deaths and 18,071 injuries due to gun-related violence so far this year, including 257 cases of “mass shootings,” where at least four people were wounded. The FBI reports 32 “mass killings,” where three or more people were killed in a single incident, in 2019 through the Dayton massacre.
Though the motives of many gunmen may be hard to determine, one thing that facilitates their massacres is the easy access to weapons of war.
There is a groundswell of public support to reinstate the assault weapons ban, which stopped the proliferation of semi-automatic rifles and high-capacity magazines from 1994 until 2004, when George W. Bush allowed it to lapse, but the National Rifle Association exists to maintain that easy access of civilians to weapons of war.
The Trace, which reports on guns in the US, noted in its NRA Campaign Spending Tracker that, in the 2018 election cycle, the NRA spent $5,362,861 supporting 265 candidates and $4,369,083 opposing 71 candidates in congressional races across 44 states. The NRA also donated $30.3 million to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Over the past decade, the NRA spent more than $100 million on political races. And where the money came from remains a secret.
If Congress can’t ban assault weapons, perhaps they could at least require people to obtain liability insurance for people they might injure, as a condition of owning an assault weapon.
The Insurance Information Institute noted in a May 2018 Background on Gun Liability that insurers rarely offer any separate gun liability insurance policy. Most individuals have some property and liability coverage for firearms in their standard homeowners’ policy. Additional liability coverage is available through a personal umbrella policy. A few policies cover losses from accidental shootings in excess of the homeowners’ coverage.
However, when there is liability insurance, it only covers accidental shootings and, in some cases, acts of self-defense. No insurance company covers criminal or other intentional shootings. But those are the incidents that sent wounded survivors to hospitals in Gilroy, El Paso and Dayton, with little recourse but to rely on their own insurance or charity to pay for their medical care.
Other sorts of coverage may be “triggered” by active shooting incidents, including general liability, business interruption and property insurance, the institute noted. Workers comp insurance is implicated in shootings in the workplace while commercial general liability insurance coverage might be implicated in shooting in a shopping center or a movie theatre.
Several states — including California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York — have considered requiring that gun owners purchase liability insurance, but none have enacted such a bill.
US Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, D-NY, since 2013 has introduced the Firearms Risk Protection Act, which, would prohibit a firearm purchase by or sale to a person who is not covered by a qualified liability insurance policy that would cover the purchaser specifically for losses resulting from use of the firearm.
US Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., is sponsoring a bill to reinstate the assault weapons ban. If it had been in place, Cicilline told the New York Times, both the El Paso and Dayton gunmen would not have been able to buy their weapons. Still, many Dems who remember that they lost the Democratic majority in Congress in 1994 after passing the assault weapons ban remain skittish about reinstating it.
But don’t kid yourself. The only way to get control over the assault weapon crisis is to vote Democratic for president and Congress. It’s particularly important for Democrats to regain control of the Senate. If Moscow Mitch McConnell remains Senate Majority Leader, we might see some feints at expanding background checks, and minor reforms on the edges, but as long as young, disturbed white men have ready access to assault rifles and extended magazines, we’ll continue to see a numbing increase in the numbers of massacres, whether racially motivated or just reflecting discontent and grievances. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2019
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