US President Donald Trump gives a statement about the recent mass
shootings in El Paso and Dayton bat Morristown Airport on August 4,
2019. He said "hate has no place" in the United States. PHOTO | NICHOLAS
KAMM | AFP
El Paso,
President Donald
Trump on Sunday said "hate has no place" in the United States after two
mass shootings left 29 dead and sparked accusations that his rhetoric
was part of the problem.
The rampages turned innocent
snippets of everyday life into nightmares of bloodshed: 20 people were
shot dead while shopping at a crowded Walmart in El Paso, Texas on
Saturday morning, and nine more outside a bar in a popular nightlife
district in Dayton, Ohio just 13 hours later.
"Hate has no place in our country," Trump said, but he also blamed mental illness for the violence
"These
are really people that are very, very seriously mentally ill," he said,
despite the fact that police have not confirmed this to be the case.
"We have to get it stopped. This has been going on for years... and years in our country," he said.
In Texas, 26 people were wounded, and 27 in Ohio, where the
shooter was killed in roughly 30 seconds by police who were patrolling
nearby.
MOTIVE
Dayton
Police Chief Richard Biehl told a news conference that the quick police
response was "crucial," preventing the shooter from entering a bar
where "there would have been... catastrophic injury and loss of life."
Biehl
said the shooter wore a mask and a bullet-proof vest and was armed with
an assault rifle fitted with a 100-round drum magazine.
Police
named the gunman as a 24-year-old white man called Connor Betts and
said that his sister was among those killed. She had gone with him to
the scene of the massacre.
Six of the nine people shot dead were black, but Biehl said Betts' motive was still unclear.
In
Texas, police said the suspect surrendered on a sidewalk near the scene
of the massacre. He was described in media reports as a 21-year-old
white man named Patrick Crusius.
He was believed to
have posted online a manifesto denouncing a "Hispanic invasion" of
Texas. El Paso, on the border with Mexico, is majority Latino.
TERRIFIED SHOPPERS
Six
of the 20 people killed in the El Paso shooting were Mexican, the
country's president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, said Sunday.
The
manifesto posted shortly before the shooting also praises the killing
of 51 Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in March.
Police
said the suspected shooter has been charged with murder offenses that
can carry the death penalty, and a federal official said investigators
are treating the El Paso shooting as a case of domestic terrorism.
At the Walmart in El Paso, terrified shoppers cowered in aisles or ran out of the store as gunfire echoed.
Most of the victims were inside the store but some were also in the parking lot outside, police said.
"Shooting
kids and women and men, to him it mostly mattered that they were
Hispanic," said Manuel Sanchez, a resident of the city.
GUN CULTURE
These
were the 250th and 251st mass shootings this year in the US, according
to the Gun Violence Archive, an NGO that defines a mass shooting as an
incident in which at least four people are wounded or killed.
Despite
a string of horrific mass shootings in the US, where gun culture is
deep-rooted, efforts to strengthen firearms regulations remain divisive.
The
latest two shootings ended a particularly tragic week for gun violence
in America: three people died in a shooting at a food festival last
Sunday in California, and two more Tuesday in a shooting in a Walmart in
Mississippi.
On Twitter, Trump described the El Paso attack as "an act of cowardice."
HATEFUL RHETORIC
But
critics said Trump's habit of speaking in derogatory terms about
immigrants is pushing hatred of foreigners into the political mainstream
and encouraging white supremacism.
"To pretend that
his administration and the hateful rhetoric it spreads doesn't play a
role in the kind of violence that we saw yesterday in El Paso is
ignorant at best and irresponsible at worst," said the Southern Poverty
Law Center, a major civil rights group.
It cited Trump
actions like calling Mexican migrants rapists and drug dealers and doing
nothing when a crowd at a Trump rally chanted "send her back" in
reference to a Somali-born congresswoman.
The
Republican mayor of El Paso, Dee Margo, seemed to discount any race
element to the Texas shooting, telling Fox News the gunman was
"deranged."
But several Democratic presidential hopefuls said Trump bears some of the blame for the violence.
"Our
president isn't just failing to confront and disarm these domestic
terrorists, he is amplifying and condoning their hate," Pete Buttigieg
tweeted.
"Mr President: stop your racist, hateful and
anti-immigrant rhetoric. Your language creates a climate which emboldens
violent extremists," Senator Bernie Sanders wrote on Twitter.
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