4 August 2019 — 0847 mdt
Rewritten 5 August, 0604 MDT
A bloody weekend in El Paso and Dayton
Patrick Crusius, 21, shot and killed 20 persons 22 (two more died today) a mall in El Paso, Texas, 90 minutes before noon Saturday. Approximately 15 hours later, 24-year-old Connor Betts, a man with a long history of disturbing behavior, shot and killed nine in Dayton, Ohio. In both incidents, dozens were wounded. Among Betts’ victims: his sister, Morgan.
Thus far, there’s no evidence the shootings were part of a conspiracy. Although there’s a faint possibility — unproven and perhaps unprovable — that the bloodshed in Texas triggered Betts’ rampage, at this point they appear to be events independent of each other.
Betts was killed by police. But Crusius was captured by the police, something he didn't expect. In a manifesto posted online just before he started shooting, he said he expected to be killed and didn’t want to be taken alive:
My death is likely inevitable. If I’m not killed by the police, then I’ll probably be gunned down by one of the invaders. Capture in this case if far worse than dying during the shooting because I’ll get the death penalty anyway. Worse still is that I would live knowing that my family despises me.
This is why I’m not going to surrender even if I run out of ammo. If I’ m captured, it will be because I was subdued somehow. Remember: it is not cowardly to pick low hanging fruit. AKA Don’t attack heavily guarded areas to fulfll your super soldier COD fantasy. Attack low security targets. Even though you might out gun a security guard or police man, they likely beat you in armor, training and numbers. Do not throw away your life on an unnecessarily dangerous target. If a target seems too hot, live to fight another day. [Excerpt from the version of the manifesto posted by the Drudge Report.]
The manifesto strikes me as the cry of a lost soul wrapped in boilerplate nativist rhetoric, the ravings of a troubled mind masquerading as political posturing. More than anything else, it seems to be a note justifying a murder-suicide.
That’s why at this point I’m not ready to conclude that this was an act of domestic terrorism by a white supremacist whose murderous behavior was incited by the reckless rhetoric of President Trump. Our Hater in Chief is President not because he converted tens of millions to his bigoted views, but because he pandered to prejudices and hatreds that have existed for centuries.
I think when the investigation is complete, the Texas shooter will be judged a homicidal psychopath, not a lone wolf political extremist.
A hazard we cannot eradicate
There’s probably an irreducible minimum of homicidal psychopaths who will strike without warning, whose sudden transformation from Mr. Milquetoast to mass murderer cannot be predicted. It’s a random hazard, in some ways analogous to being blasted to Kingdom Come by an undetectable little asteroid suddenly slamming into Earth. Lethal, but rare, it’s an unpleasant fact of life. We should not delude ourselves that we can eradicate these events by outlawing hate speech and political discourse that we find unsettling or frightening.
But there’s no question that the dangers these aberrant humans pose to society are tremendously magnified by their living in a nation awash in easily obtained firearms, a nation that has decided, through its choice of elected officials, that a mass shooting now and then is an acceptable price to pay for the freedom to own and carry weapons, many of which have no legitimate use outside a battlefield.I doubt these latest mass shootings will have the emotional power to drive a successful campaign to tighten-up our laws governing firearms, making it more difficult for dangerous people to obtain firearms. I hope I’m wrong, but that’s my gloomy assessment, based on decades of experience with the issue. As a nation, we don’t like what’s happening, but we want improvement without change, an impossibility we still lack the wit and courage to recognize. The bloodshed will continue.