My concern about situations like the Jacksonville shooter is that the media spreads assumptions and conclusions prior to an investigation, and cities are burned and property destroyed, only to find there was more, contrary to the story. In this case, the conclusion is that the shooting is purely racially motivated, and the final story is that white racists are going around killing black people for no reason other than their skin color. The alternative conclusion will also likely be that guns are a public threat.
A more realistic response might be that mental illness is a significant threat facing our nation, or even that SSRIs pose a threat to public health and may actually contribute to instability.
You might be reading this, thinking, "Oh, c'mon! The guy wrote it himself in his manifesto, he's a racist! He had swastikas on his rifle."
Case closed. Nevermind, let's not investigate at all, and witchhunt our way through every incident.
Some considerations about the Jacksonville shooter:
History of mental illness.
The first obvious clue is the shooter's history of mental illness. Yet, the overriding focus is on racism. The truth is that racism all around us, in every culture and of race. The difference is that they don't go on a shooting spree. But because this is a white shooter, the focus is on the manifesto and racism. Had this been a black shooter, the focus would be on mental illness. Had this been a Muslim shooter, the media would say it was an isolated case of mental illness. White shooter, white racist, case closed.
Why didn't the shooter go after the black college and instead went after three people at a Dollar General?
The shooter applied his gear at the black college, then went across the street to the Dollar General.
Why did he focus on three people at a Dollar Gen when he could have gone after an entire campus?
Might the shooter have had prior history with the employees?
Even with his manifesto, considering his history of mental illness, he might have written the manifesto based on a history with the victims. Any associated anxiety might have gone into delusional thinking that led to this event.
Two of the three victims were Dollar Gen. employees, but I see articles re-telling the story that all the victims were shoppers. Shoppers are potentially random targets (presumably because they are black), whereas employees are regular occupants of the location (possible recurrent interactions or findable).
White out swastikas on the weapon
Not very convincing. The shooter was a fat ass with a full head of hair - not exactly the poster boy for Nazi youth. Strikes me more as nuts than "white supremecist". He killed himself over three people? Not very committed to or proud of his cause.
What do we know about the victims? Who were they?
Not to judge a book by its cover (heaven forbid), but I doubt we'd find him on campus at the black college across the street. But who knows, maybe he's practicing flashing gang signs as part of his sociology studies.
What is Jacksonville culture like?
Parts of Jacksonville are known for hostile black ghetto culture. Could it be that living in this kind of environment causes people to form those kinds of attitudes, not merely skin color? Put a mentally unstable person in that environment and they lose control. They react to a legitimate problem in an extreme way.
Isn't that a big part of the current problem - that society cannot criticize any protected culture for fear of being labeled a racist, even when anyone, including others in that culture, are fed up with it.
Just like living around mean, ignorant rednecks (I've lived that life), it sucks because it's scary to be around it - only we can slam rednecks all day and get social credit for it.
People hated George W Bush for a lot of reasons, but when people are angry, the personal attacks and insults account for a lot of the collateral damage. We hear "rich frat boy douche bag" but what triggers the insults is more along the lines of "dynasty oil family warmongers".
But again, this shooter didn't go after the black college, he went after three Dollar General employees, which I suspect was more personal, while the exhaust in his manifesto may have been the rage towards the culture, perhaps culminated through interactions with these individuals.
Biased reactions and statements from officials
The black sheriff talks about the shooter like he knows the guy, and adds "The hate that motivated the shooter's killing spree adds an additional layer of heartbreak," Waters said.
Just the facts, sir. We don't need a sheriff publically stamping his conclusions prior to investigation.
And DeSantis with his statement:
The shooter took "the coward's way out", and "The shooting, based on the manifesto that they discovered from the scumbag who did this, was racially motivated. He was targeting people based on their race. That is totally unacceptable," DeSantis said.
Duh! What an absurd, cursory response. Ahead of an investigation, everyone feels compelled to cry race. Life is not so simple. Thanks, Ron, for condemning puppy kickers and confirming your commitment.
Shortly after DeSantis spoke, Jeffrey Rumlin, a pastor at the Dayspring Church in Jacksonville, took the microphone and said of the shooter: "At the end of the day, respectfully, governor, he was not a scumbag. He was a racist."
Or, he was mentally ill. Or there was more to the story. Nah, he was a racist.
And, Joe Biden:
'We must refuse to live in a country where Black families going to the store or Black students going to school live in fear of being gunned down because of the color of their skin. Hate must have no safe harbor. Silence is complicity and we must not remain silent.'
Yet, if whites are afraid of blacks, they are criticized for racial profiling and racism. The skin color isn't the threat, it's the violence associated with the culture, and by association, the skin color. A culture that celebrates gangs, violence, drugs and prostitution in their popular music, as a direct result of fatherless ghettos perpetually funded by our leftist government. That's the real systemic racism.
And Biden takes the liberty of expanding the incident as a purely race-based event, with no mention of mental illness of the shooter. Irresponsible fear-mongering to take a mentally ill mass shooting and broaden to the assertion that blacks should live in fear, like this is a common occurrence. Far less common than the constant violence coming from blacks daily, year in and out, without remorse or excuse of mental illness, and the anti-white rhetoric that's often applauded and institutionalized.
We have a 30% increase in murders across the country, mass theft committed by droves of blacks out in the open, and 70% of violent crime committed by blacks and Latinos, but we dismiss it as the result of systemic racism. Or we focus only on black-on-black crime.
But how much black hatred towards whites gets swept away and the claim is that blacks cannot be racist. The narrative desperately leads with accusations of white supremacy and white racism, it's a pitiful Where's Waldo game.
Meanwhile, blacks play knock-out games, attacking Jews and Asians and homosexuals, and broadcast attacks on whites on Worldstar hip hop. The systemic racism is towards whites. It doesn't help bring cultures together or advance blacks with any kind of real stability, rather it breeds resentment and pits us against each other.
Clearly, a shooter situation like this is tragic, but regardless of the manifesto the rush to focus on racism and white supremacy eclipsed mental illness and leaped ahead of an investigation.
If I made a gut judgment, I'd say this 21-year-old looks like a bully's delight. He's the classic school shooter who vented his anger on these people. Certainly, there are enough surrounding questions that call for further investigation.
Maybe there's never enough evidence to know the full story, but given the history of these events, I'm not on board with Biden's mantra that white supremacy is the greatest threat facing our nation. And this incident broke out just in time for the elections.
At least BLM isn't around to torch Jacksonville ahead of the investigation (if there is one). Let's see what more comes of this incident.
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