A racist shooting spree in Jacksonville
What happened
The Justice Department opened a hate crimes investigation this week after a white gunman using a swastika-adorned rifle shot dead three Black people at a Dollar General in Jacksonville, Fla. Ryan Palmeter, 21, fatally shot Angela Michelle Carr, 52, as she sat in her car outside the store, before entering the building and killing AJ Laguerre Jr.—a 19-year-old Dollar General employee—and Jerrald Gallion, 29. Palmeter then texted his father and told him to go into his room, where he found a suicide note and 20 pages of racist writings. The suspect’s family called police; Palmeter was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound when officers arrived at the store. Before the attack, the gunman stopped in the parking lot of the historically black Edward Waters University; he fled after being confronted by campus security. “He targeted a certain group of people and that’s Black people,” said Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters. “He hated Blacks.”
Palmeter bought his AR-15–style rifle and a handgun legally this year, despite having been placed under a 72-hour psychiatric hold in 2017 for threatening suicide. Under Florida law, such incidents do not appear in background checks unless the person is subsequently committed. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called the gunman a “major-league scumbag” at a Jacksonville vigil, adding, “We are not going to let people be targeted based on their race.” The crowd booed DeSantis—who has sought to curb discussion of racism in public schools and colleges—and a subsequent speaker responded to his remarks. “Respectfully, Governor, he was not a scumbag,” said local pastor Jeffrey Rumlin. “He was a racist.”
What the columnists said
Authorities in Jacksonville claimed the shooter was a lone wolf, said Juliette Kayyem in The Atlantic, but white supremacists do “not act in isolation.” They are fueled by an online ecosystem of far-right chat rooms, where angry young men study, glorify, and seek to replicate past racist mass killings—in Norway, New Zealand, Texas. “Like foreign terror groups,” they use violence to publicize their message: that whites “are still in charge” and “willing to kill to prove it.”
“DeSantis said the right things in the wake of the shooting,” said the Miami Herald in an editorial. Yet the governor’s words ring hollow after two years of pushing white-grievance politics. He has “demonized an AP Black studies course, scared parents about critical race theory, and painted diversity, equity, and inclusion as antiAmerican.” DEI, CRT and the “woke” teaching of systemic racism “don’t kill people. White supremacy does, as it did in mass murders in Jacksonville, Buffalo, Charleston, El Paso, and Pittsburgh.”
Meanwhile, the carnage continues, said Nicole Narea in Vox. So far this year, America has suffered at least 476 mass shootings—a term defined as attacks in which four or more people are killed, so Jacksonville is not included. Our gun homicide rate is 26 times that of other high-income countries; our gun suicide rate nearly 12 times higher. With guns present in 45 percent of U.S. households and “a vocal Republican minority” opposed to commonsense firearms regulations—including universal background checks—“there’s no telling how many more people will die.”