How this ‘self-determination’ could be achieved short of ethnic cleansing was addressed by neither the terrorist, nor the more respectable mob preaching a similar doctrine in suits and ties, under the label ‘immigration reform’. These may include the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Centre for Immigration Studies, and the assorted anti-immigrant rabble-rousers funded by the radical-Right Tanton Network, which my colleague from CARR, Mark Potok, has done so much to expose in work published today, to commemorate the two-year anniversary of this domestic terrorist attack.
Pandemic of violence
This is far from all of the horrors revealed two years on from the worst mass murder of Latinos in modern American history. Alongside the racism too often neglected in the US, which underpinned the El Paso mass shooting, these, too, are inconvenient truths.
Firstly, tomorrow, 4 August 2021, is the second anniversary of another similar shooting, which killed and wounded more than two dozen innocents in Dayton, Ohio, only 13 hours after the terrorist attack in El Paso.
In Dayton, the murderer fired more than a bullet a second before he was neutralised by police, reportedly only 30 seconds after commencing his attack on a bar at 1am.
This is a preventable pandemic of weapons of war, which are sold, fetishized and serving their purpose not on battlefields, but on American streets. For all of the US’s famed ingenuity, it is a problem our country cannot seem to address, much less solve. With the number of gun deaths at roughly the rate of a 9/11 each month, that is something that shames us all.
Secondly, the terrorist murderer in El Paso posted his racist manifesto on the chan platforms so beloved of self-directed terrorists (who are often misleadingly called ‘lone wolves’). 4chan, 8chan, 8kun, Edchan: these days, there are almost as many of these sites as there are terrorists drawing upon them, as networks of support for their deathly methods, inspirations, and manifestos.
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