A shooter opened fire at a Florida Dollar General store on Saturday, killing three people in what Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters described as a racially motivated crime. All three victims are Black Americans. The shooter — a white male in his early 20’s, was armed with a handgun and an AR-style rifle with swastikas painted on it — killed himself before authorities could apprehend him. The incident occurred after the shooter attempted to enter the campus of Edward Waters University, a historically Black university, but was refused entry.
Sheriff Waters described writings left by the shooter outlining a “disgusting ideology of hate” and the FBI is investigating the incident as a hate crime.
Technically, this event doesn’t qualify as a mass shooting; the Gun Violence Archive defines that as an incident during which four or more people are shot. But it is noteworthy because it’s part of a trend of racially motivated attacks that have recently occurred in places like Buffalo, Atlanta, Charleston and Los Angeles among many others.
There have been 473 mass shootings in the US in 2023 as of publication time.
No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 43,375 per year. Since 2009, there has been an annual average of 19 shootings in which at least four people are killed. The US gun homicide rate is as much as 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate is nearly 12 times higher.
Gun control opponents have typically framed the gun violence epidemic in the US as a symptom of a broader mental health crisis. But every country has people with mental health issues and extremists; those problems aren’t unique. What is unique is the US’s expansive view of civilian gun ownership, ingrained in politics, in culture, and in the law since the nation’s founding, and a national political process…
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