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On Identitarian Mass Shooters, including Blacks Who Target Whites
I only have one point to add to the observation that “Mass shootings are always acts of violent suicide”: Mass shooters are either universalists or identitarians. The universalists fall into two groups, generalists who blame all of humanity and personalizers who blame people they know, their family or coworkers or schoolmates. The identitarians appear to fall into many groups because identitarians have so many ways to hate—some based on race, some on sex, some on culture—but they are united in choosing targets purely because of the social identity their victims seem to have. Perhaps the clearest example was set in the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting when Patrick Crusius killed 23 people and wounded an equal number. He shot anyone who looked Hispanic to him. He let anyone who looked white or black go free.
Identitarian killers are called extremists because turning hate into actions is extreme, but in every case, identitarian killers learned their hate from moderate haters who scapegoated a social group for the world’s evils. The common image of a mass shooter is a white man, but while shooters are disproportionately male, they are not disproportionately white. And while the common image of a racist mass shooter is a white man, the truth is black racists of both sexes also kill strangers simply because of the color of their skin. A few…
