The shooting came about 13 hours after a gunman in El Paso left at least 20 dead and 26 others wounded and one week after a gunman killed three people and wounded 13 others in a shooting at a garlic festival in Gilroy, California, media reports said. Officials in El Paso were investigating whether the suspect in the killings, a white man in his 20s, was linked to a racist manifesto railing against immigration and the growing Hispanic population in Texas.
The attack is raising tensions in a predominantly Latino city that was already on edge over the federal government’s targeting of migrant families, according to New York Times. The Walmart is less than 10 minutes’ drive from Bridge of the Americas linking El Paso and its sister city in Mexico, Ciudad Juárez, and is a regular destination for Mexican tourists who come to the city to shop and visit family. No wonder that among the dead are included three Mexicans.
The Gun Violence Archive, which categorises mass shootings as four or more people shot or killed (excluding the shooter), said there have been 251 such incidents this year. But these recurrent episodes still fail to undercut the influence the gun lobby wields in the US corridors of power.
Even after so much blood has spilled – what with guns in every hand – the powerful arms manufacturers go unchallenged. Further fuelling this violence is the proliferating hate ideology. There is no knowing how Washington proposes to check this wantonness.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 5th, 2019.
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