A gunman carrying a rifle emblazoned with a swastika killed three people at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, on Saturday before taking his own life.
The shooter, 21-year-old Ryan Christopher Palmete, was white. All of his victims—52-year-old Angela Michelle Carr, 19-year-old Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr., and 29-year-old Jerrald Gallion—were black. Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters has said that the murder spree was racially motivated and Palmete specifically targeted black people. The sheriff also noted that the guns Palmete was carrying were legally purchased.
As is so often the case with crimes like these, people are casting about for someone other than one racist psychopath—or “deranged scumbag,” as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis put it—to blame. Some have settled on “divisive rhetoric” as the culprit.
“When we have this kind of divisive rhetoric, this is exactly what happens,” journalism professor and Jacksonville councilmember Rahman Johnson told MSNBC’s Symone Sanders-Townsend. He mentioned Florida’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings, African-American studies programs in schools, and transgender people.
“The division has to stop, the hate has to stop, the rhetoric has to stop,” Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan said.
An op-ed in the Florida Times-Union blamed the city’s reaction to antisemitic banners and light displays, saying the response wasn’t “forceful enough.” Those “public demonstrations look like terrible harbingers of what was to come,” wrote columnist Nate Monroe.
Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon blamed attacks on “wokeness,” which she called “a dog whistle. That wokeness that they want to die is Black people, and it was evident yesterday by what happened,” Nixon said.
Needless to say, plenty of people hear the same rhetoric Palmete may have heard about diversity trainings, wokeness, and so on but don’t go on to commit atrocities. And openly bigoted speech, as represented by those antisemitic banners, is much less common now than at most points in U.S. history past.
Hellbound and Down 