Two mass shootings leave dozens dead in Texas, Ohio
Critics hit hard at Trump, saying his custom of speaking in derogatory terms about immigrants is pushing hatred of foreigners into the political mainstream and encouraging white supremacist thinking that increases violence.
Two mass shootings in a mater of hours let 30 people dead, fuelling an angry debate on America’s rampant gun violence and bringing new charges on Sunday that President Donald Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric encourages extremist violence.
The rampages turned innocent snippets of everyday life into nightmares of bloodshed: 20 people 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.
In Texas another 26 people were wounded, and 27 in Ohio.
UAE President His Highness Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan has sent a cable of condolences to Trump, on the victims of the mass shootings.
Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum and His Highness Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, also sent similar condolences messages to Trump.
In Dayton, the shooter, armed with a long gun, was killed by police in less than a minute.
They just happened to be nearby, and prevented a casualty toll that could have gone into the hundreds, Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley said.
Still, in those few seconds the shooter managed to mow down dozens of people.
“You could see the bodies actually start to fall and we knew it was bigger than just even a shoot-out,” Anthony Reynolds, who was outside the Dayton bar when the shooting started, told NBC News. Reynolds described the shooter as a white man dressed all in black, with his face covered and armed with an assault rifle.
Authorities have not identified this shooter but news outlets also said he was white.
In Texas, a suspect surrendered shortly ater the massacre and was described in media as a 21-year-old white man named Patrick Crusius who may have posted online a manifesto denouncing a “Hispanic invasion” of Texas.
El Paso, on the border with Mexico, is majority Latino.
The manifesto posted shortly before the shooting started also praises the killing of 51 Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in March and the person who wrote it indicated they expected to die in the shooting.
Terrified shoppers cowered in aisles or ran out of the store as gunfire echoed.
Vanessa Saenz, a Walmart shopper, said the El Paso shooter was wearing a black T-shirt, cargo pants and ear protectors. She said it looked like he was “dancing.”
People near the shooter became cornered, and Saenz said she recalls him raising his rifle, aiming at them and shooting.
“The one thing I’ll never forget is the way he walked into Walmart, very confident. He was on a mission and that’s when it hit me,” Saenz told ABC News Radio.
These were the 250th and 251st mass shootings this year in the US, according to the Gun Violence Archive, an NGO. It defines mass shooting as an incident in which at least four people are wounded or killed in a shooting.
On Twiter, Trump described the El Paso atack as “an act of cowardice.”
On Sunday morning he tweeted again saying “God bless the people of El Paso Texas. God bless the people of Dayton, Ohio.”
But critics hit hard at Trump, saying his custom of speaking in derogatory terms about immigrants is pushing hatred of foreigners into the political mainstream and encouraging white supremacist thinking that encourages violence.
“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, threatening raids against immigrant families, removing small children from families that cross over from Mexico without papers and doing nothing when a crowd at a Trump rally chanted “send her back” in reference to a Somali-born congresswoman who is among a group of four non-white female lawmakers that Trump has told to “go back” to their native countries.
The Republican mayor of El Paso seemed to discount any race element to the Texas shooting, saying the gunman was disturbed.