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Ritual human sacrifice: the price of freedom? by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on August 5, 2019

Ritual human sacrifice: the price of freedom?
by Tom Sullivan

Reports indicate the FBI has not yet determined a motive behind the Dayton, Ohio shooting rampage Sunday morning. But with mass-shootings in Gilroy, California, El Paso, Texas, and Dayton coming within a week, it is natural to wonder if they are connected. They are. In guns and in death.

How else is less clear. As of Wednesday, the FBI had not determined a motive for the Gilroy shootings that left three dead and six wounded. The gunman shot himself.

“The information that’s out there, it’s being reported that there’s white nationalism or any type of those ideologies,” Special Agent John Bennett told reporters. “That has not been determined and I wanted to knock that down.”

Authorities are investigating the El Paso shootings as domestic terrorism. Twenty killed, over two dozen injured. The suspect in that case surrendered to police. Prior to the attack, police say, he posted online a statement filled with anti-immigrant and racist language. The “invasion” of Texas by Latinos would make Texas solidly Democratic and turn the country into a one-party state, etc. He drove from the Dallas suburbs to El Paso to kill as many Mexicans as possible. His statement echoes language broadcast weekly by the acting president and conservative opinion outlets.

The Ohio suspect arrived in downtown Dayton Saturday night with the sister he later gunned down and her male companion. He separated from the other two and later appeared in a mask and began shooting people in the street before police shot and killed him. But not before he killed nine others in under a minute.

The Dayton Daily News reports the gunman, while he had no significant criminal record, had an “unusual obsession with killing and death.” Plus, a history of drawing up death lists and “a dark energy around him.”

“I think this is less of a hate crime and more of an ‘I hate everybody’ crime,” Demoy Howell, a former classmate, told the Daily News. “I honestly feel more comfortable now knowing that he’s gone.”

There is enough evidence to find a connection between El Paso and other white nationalist violence. The alleged shooter’s online statement “reads as a carbon copy of that espoused by those who carried out the recent and respective attacks on the mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh,” writes CJ Werleman for the Sydney Morning Herald:

These right-wing extremists are not only channelling neo-Nazi borne “Great Replacement” conspiracy theories, which frame demographic change as a threat to white Europeans, but also taking a cue from the words and policies of President Donald Trump.

[…]

It’s worth remembering that when a Rwandan politician described Rwanda’s Tutsi minority as “cockroaches” it started a genocide that resulted in the deaths of upwards of one million people in that country.

While close in time, the Gilroy and Dayton deaths may not be connected to El Paso by ideology any more than Chicago’s summer ritual of drive-by shootings are. Seven were wounded in a park there over the weekend.

They are all connected, however, by a gun culture that demands ritual human sacrifice as the price others must pay for the “freedom,” so-called, of the gun lobby to profit from it. They are connected by gun fetishists and bought politicians who do nothing while solemnly offering thoughts and prayers. They are connected by a feedback loop of violence that normalizes shooting rampages, drive-by shootings, police shootings of unarmed black men, veterans’ suicides, and the weekly list of accidental shootings curated at #gunfail.

They are connected by the tacit permission one slaughter — political or not — gives to the next, and lately by conspiracy theories that claim white people are being “replaced” at the apex of the socio-political ladder by lessers, i.e., by people of color who must be stopped.

A friend in TV used to joke that he got started filming the daily “wreck at 6.” Now, it’s the daily body count.

As Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine addressed a Dayton vigil Sunday night, the crowd chanted over and over, “Do something!“


Meme by @litbrit.

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