Within just 13 hours apart, two mass shootings took place in El Paso, Texas, Saturday and in Dayton, Ohio, early Sunday, leaving a total of 29 dead and 53 injured. The two mass shootings came less than a week after the shooting at the Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California, killing three people while the shooter was also killed.
Police say Connor Betts, a 24-year-old white man behind a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, killed his sister and eight others before he was fatally shot by police. Authorities say the shooter was killed by police less than a minute after he started shooting with a .223-caliber rifle into the streets of a popular Dayton nightlife area around 1 a.m. Sunday.
The bloodshed in Ohio unfolded just hours after 20 people were killed by a gunman, Patrick Crusius, 21, who stalked a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. More than two dozen were injured.
Six days ago on Sunday, July 28, 19-year-old Santino William Legan opened fire at the Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California, killing three and injuring 12 others. The shooter was killed by the police.
Motives behind the Dayton, Ohio killer are not clear. However motives of El Paso shooter, Patrick Crusius, and Gilroy, Santino William Legan are known.
Crusius posted a four-page manifesto on internet saying he was inspired by a manifesto written by the white supremacist, Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 worshippers at two mosques in New Zealand in March this year.
Tellingly, the Gilroy shooter Legan just before the shooting urged his Instagram followers to read a 19th-century book, "Might is Right", which is popular with white supremacists on extremist websites.
Manifesto of El Paso shooter Patrick Crusius
According to the Daily Beast, approximately 45 minutes before the first report of gunfire, a user on the forum 8chan announced that they were planning an attack, indicated that they were in Texas, and that they would use an AK-47 similar to the weapon photographed on the gunman to carry out the attack.
The announcement was accompanied by an anti-immigrant manifesto that invoked white-supremacist terms to justify violence against Hispanic people.
The author of the El Paso manifesto, Patrick Crusius, was said to have been inspired by a manifesto written by the white supremacist, Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 worshippers at two mosques in New Zealand in March this year.
John Earnest, the alleged attacker of a synagogue in Poway, California, in April this year also cited that manifesto. According to court documents in social-media posts Earnest, 19, praised Tarrant's hate-filled writings, writing "I've only read a little but so far he's spot on with everything." Earnest also said that "I think it's important that everyone should read it," referring to Tarrant's racist manifesto.
Titled "The Inconvenient Truth," the Patrick Crusius's manifesto is an anti-immigrant screed that takes particular aim at the Hispanic community and expresses support for the Christchurch, New Zealand, shooter who opened fire at two mosques in March and killed 51 Muslims. "In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto.
"This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion," begins the manifesto and includes lots of white-supremacist language, such as claiming that the writer was "against race mixing." It hardly seems a coincidence, then, that the shooting took place in El Paso, a city that is just across the border from Mexico.
Crusius
argues: "Some people will think
this statement is hypocritical because of the nearly
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