As toll rises, a familiar aftermath
Trump blames media for U.S. shootings, others blame him
EL PASO, TEXAS — Anguished families planned funerals in two U.S. cities on Monday, politicians pointed fingers and a nation numbed by gun violence wondered what might come next as the death toll from two weekend mass shootings rose to 31.
The attacks 2,100 kilometres apart — at a packed shopping centre in El Paso, Texas, and a popular nightlife stretch in Dayton, Ohio — also injured dozens more.
They became the newest entries on an ever-growing list of mass shooting sites and spurred discussion on where to lay the blame.
President Donald Trump cited mental illness and video games but steered away from talk of curbing gun sales.
For all the back-to-back horror of innocent people slain amid everyday life, decades of an unmistakably American problem of gun violence ensured it wasn’t entirely shocking. Even as the familiar post-shooting rituals played out in both cities, others clung to life in hospitals, with two new fatalities recorded among those injured at the shooting at the Walmart in El Paso.
As in a litany of other shooting sites before, the public juggled stories of the goodness seen in lives cut short with inklings of the demented motives of the shooters, and on-scene heroics with troubling ideologies that may have sparked the bloodshed.
Equally familiar, Washington reacted along party lines, with Trump’s vague suggestion of openness to new gun laws met with skepticism by an opposition that has heard similar talk before.
“Hate has no place in America,” the president declared in a 10-minute speech from the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, condemning racism and rehashing national conversations on treatment for mental health, depiction of violence in the media, and discourse on the internet.
A racist screed authorities were working to confirm was left by the alleged perpetrator in the Texas shooting on Saturday, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, mirrored some of Trump’s antiimmigrant rhetoric. Some, like Ernesto Carrillo, whose brotherin-law Ivan Manzano was killed in the Walmart attack, said the president shares blame for inflammatory language Carrillo called a “campaign of terror.”
“His work as a generator of hate ended in this,” said Carrillo, who crossed the border from Ciudad Juarez on Monday for a meeting in El Paso with Mexico’s foreign minister.
Trump, in turn, tweeted that the media “contributed greatly to the anger and rage that has built up.”
Trump suggested a bill to expand gun background checks could be combined with his longsought effort to toughen the nation’s immigration system, but gave no rationale for the pairing.
Studies have repeatedly shown immigrants have a lower level of criminality than those born in the U.S., both shooting suspects were citizens, and federal officials are investigating anti-immigrant bias as a potential motive in the Texas massacre.
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a leading voice on gun reform since the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in his state rattled the country with the slaughter of 20 children, dismissed the president’s proposal as meaningless.
In both incidents, a young white male was identified as the lone suspect. Though authorities were eyeing racism as a factor in Texas, where the alleged shooter has been booked on murder charges, in Ohio police said there was no indication of a similar motivation.
Police in Dayton responded in about 30 seconds early Sunday and fatally shot 24-year-old Connor Betts. Police said the quickness of the rampage made any discrimination in the shooting seem unlikely.
Betts’s sister was also among the dead.