• When the shooter is white
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/10/06/when-the-shooter-is-white/?tid=sm_tw

    When perpetrators of violence are people of color, journalists, politicians and many citizens treat their violence as natural, expected. But when shooters are white men who kill white victims, politicians like Trump, and indeed many other facets of white America, reach for the notion of an unstable, angry, isolated person driven to mass murder.

    That description is a relatively new one: the image of a disturbed, gun-obsessed, white male loner who presents a threat to mainstream society emerged alongside the rise of mass shootings over the past two decades. To pick but one example, in the aftermath of Newtown, headlines repeatedly described killer Adam Lanza as a deranged “loner” who “felt no pain.”

    We emphasize the mental health of white mass shooters because these men look like “us,” meaning that there is nothing predictive about the ways they look that might foretell their actions, save their awkwardness and isolation when “they” interact with “us.” In other words, they could be anyone — part of what gives these events their terrifying valence.

    As has been widely pointed out, however, American politicians and media outlets, along with any number of citizens, reflexively look to blame larger cultures, politics or ideologies when the perpetrator of a massacre is nonwhite. Put bluntly, the only reason we aren’t referring to mass killers like Paddock as terrorists, even though spectacular events like the Las Vegas shooting meet the textbook definition of terrorism, is because of their race. Underlying that argument is an assumption that race likewise foretells the violence of nonwhite shooters.

    Blaming crazed nonwhite “cultures” when guns are involved is a tradition with deep roots in American history. Indeed, the dynamic took shape decades before the current double standard of white “shooters” and Muslim “cultures” emerged, as the very notion of guns for everyday domestic protection entered American consciousness.