Another mass shooting we “can’t do anything about.” Another racist motivation. But… another “lone gunman”? When are we going to wake up?

A mass shooting in Jacksonville, FL over the weekend was again motivated by racial hatred. How do we know? The shooter left his manifestos before shooting up a Dollar General, killing three, and then turning the gun on himself.

The sheriff, T.K. Waters, wanted to assure the public that the gunman “acted alone.” In the very strict legal sense of the action… yes. But in reality? Hardly.

This from The Atlantic over the weekend:

Waters plainly wanted to calm the public, the Black public, by stating that the gunman “acted completely alone,” as if to assure the community that it was no longer under threat. His statement that “there is absolutely no evidence that the shooter is part of any large group” may technically be true but is a false narrative. White supremacists, and in particular neo-Nazis, are not acting in isolation, and they like to put on a show.

Right-wing violence is done by individuals, but they are organizing and learning from an online apparatus as well as the actions of previous like-minded killers. Mass killings from the past, in New Zealand or Norway or South Carolina, are studied and replicated, each feeding off the others. Like foreign terror groups, these men seek to use violence as a way to attract attention to their cause. “The culture of martyrdom and insurgency within groups like the Taliban and ISIS is something to admire and reproduce in the neo-Nazi terror movement,” a 2019 online poster advocated on a neo-Nazi site. These killings are done to amplify that movement’s perverse narrative of America—that white people are still in charge and that many of them are willing to kill to prove it, and they do so publicly to terrorize.

More HERE.

The shooter may be solitary when the action takes place, such as in Jacksonville, but don’t think for one minute this is a “loner.” They are NOT loners.

This is a movement. It is meant to instill fear in a culture. These are people being weaponized to keep on doing what slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK, mass incarceration, and the “war on drugs” have meant to do to Black people for centuries… “keep them in their place.”

Why do we, as white people, keep standing on the sidelines on this?