Another senseless, devastating mass shooting over the weekend, this time at a mall in Allen, Texas. Eight killed. Just utterly heartbreaking.
Regarding for the “nature” of this attack—a point of much confusion and argument in recent days—some of my thoughts follow:
Suspected shooter Mauricio Garcia ascribed to neo-Nazism, as SITE Intelligence Group reported. However, Garcia does not resemble mass shooters like Payton Gendron (Buffalo), Patrick Crusius (El Paso), Robert Bowers (Pittsburgh), and so on. His neo-Nazism and racism seemed less rooted in accelerationism and praising terrorist “saints” like Brenton Tarrant, but rather in simpler forms of hatred. As a Hispanic man himself, his writings on social media and in his diary shifted between self-loathing reflections on his own heritage and suggestions that “Hispanics will be the new white people.”
And, to little surprise, misogyny was also at play. One post even contains text pulled directly from posts on a popular incel forum. These quotes, taken from various incel users in recent years, read, “Men aren't entitled to sex?, true I agree, but women aren't entitled to safety either” and “If men cannot be creators Of society, they will be destroyers of society.”
I touch on this exact element in my book, Saints and Soldiers, explaining how shooters’ far-right ideologies frequently overshadow their toxic sexism: “This misogyny is omnipresent, injected in one way or another into most discussions about race wars and racial hatred.”
All of that said, it seems that while Garcia did indeed hold extremist views, he didn’t attack solely on behalf of those views. Garcia in some ways reminds me of a person like Highland Park parade shooter Robert Crimo: a disturbed individual that probably just wanted to carry out an attack.
With these mass shootings being so commonplace, the lines between “extremist motivations” and a “disturbed individual” become murkier—and in some cases, a pointless distinction in our gun-inundated society.
