EL PASO, United States, Aug 5, 2019 (AFP) – President Donald Trump on
Sunday said “hate has no place” in the United States after two mass shootings
left 29 dead and sparked accusations that his rhetoric was part of the
problem.
The rampages turned innocent snippets of everyday life into nightmares of
bloodshed: 20 people were shot dead while shopping at a crowded Walmart in El
Paso, Texas on Saturday morning, and nine more outside a bar in a popular
nightlife district in Dayton, Ohio just 13 hours later.
“Hate has no place in our country,” Trump said, but he also blamed mental
illness for the violence
“These are really people that are very, very seriously mentally ill,” he
said, despite the fact that police have not confirmed this to be the case.
“We have to get it stopped. This has been going on for years… and years
in our country,” he said.
In Texas, 26 people were wounded, and 27 in Ohio, where the shooter was
killed in roughly 30 seconds by police who were patrolling nearby.
– 100-round drum magazine –
Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl told a news conference that the quick
police response was “crucial,” preventing the shooter from entering a bar
where “there would have been… catastrophic injury and loss of life.”
Biehl said the shooter wore a mask and a bullet-proof vest and was armed
with an assault rifle fitted with a 100-round drum magazine.
Police named the gunman as a 24-year-old white man called Connor Betts and
said that his sister was among those killed. She had gone with him to the
scene of the massacre.
Six of the nine people shot dead were black, but Biehl said Betts’ motive
was still unclear.
In Texas, police said the suspect surrendered on a sidewalk near the scene
of the massacre. He was described in media reports as a 21-year-old white man
named Patrick Crusius.
He was believed to have posted online a manifesto denouncing a “Hispanic
invasion” of Texas. El Paso, on the border with Mexico, is majority Latino.
– ‘Amplifying and condoning’ hate –
Six of the 20 people killed in the El Paso shooting were Mexican, the
country’s president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, said Sunday.
The manifesto posted shortly before the shooting also praises the killing
of 51 Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in March.
Police said the suspected shooter has been charged with murder offenses
that can carry the death penalty, and a federal official said investigators
are treating the El Paso shooting as a case of domestic terrorism.
At the Walmart in El Paso, terrified shoppers cowered in aisles or ran out
of the store as gunfire echoed.
Most of the victims were inside the store but some were also in the
parking lot outside, police said.
“Shooting kids and women and men, to him it mostly mattered that they were
Hispanic,” said Manuel Sanchez, a resident of the city.
These were the 250th and 251st mass shootings this year in the US,
according to the Gun Violence Archive, an NGO that defines a mass shooting as
an incident in which at least four people are wounded or killed.
Despite a string of horrific mass shootings in the US, where gun culture is
deep-rooted, efforts to strengthen firearms regulations remain divisive.
The latest two shootings ended a particularly tragic week for gun violence
in America: three people died in a shooting at a food festival last Sunday in
California, and two more Tuesday in a shooting in a Walmart in Mississippi.
On Twitter, Trump described the El Paso attack as “an act of cowardice.”
But critics said Trump’s habit of speaking in derogatory terms about
immigrants is pushing hatred of foreigners into the political mainstream and
encouraging white supremacism.
“To pretend that his administration and the hateful rhetoric it spreads
doesn’t play a role in the kind of violence that we saw yesterday in El Paso
is ignorant at best and irresponsible at worst,” said the Southern Poverty
Law Center, a major civil rights group.
It cited Trump actions like calling Mexican migrants rapists and drug
dealers and doing nothing when a crowd at a Trump rally chanted “send her
back” in reference to a Somali-born congresswoman.
The Republican mayor of El Paso, Dee Margo, seemed to discount any race
element to the Texas shooting, telling Fox News the gunman was “deranged.”
But several Democratic presidential hopefuls said Trump bears some of the
blame for the violence.
“Our president isn’t just failing to confront and disarm these domestic
terrorists, he is amplifying and condoning their hate,” Pete Buttigieg
tweeted.
“Mr. President: stop your racist, hateful and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Your language creates a climate which emboldens violent extremists,” Senator
Bernie Sanders wrote on Twitter.