Let's break this down to the most basic explanation to what happened this past week across the Atlanta metro.
An angry guy with a gun shot and killed Asian women. If that doesn't sound racist to you, if that doesn't sound misogynistic to you, then YOU have a goddamn problem because that's EXACTLY WHAT THIS IS. (To the NPR article by Bill Chappell, Vanessa Romo, and Jaclyn Diaz)
The sheriff's office said Long confessed to the crime and told officials about a "temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate." They said it is too early to determine whether he'll be charged with a hate crime.
Six women of Asian descent are among the dead, raising suspicions of a hate crime. Long claims race did not play a role in his decision to target the businesses, authorities said, relaying details from questioning the gunman.
Long is believed to have "frequented these places, and he may have been lashing out," Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds said after noting that the suspect indicated to investigators that he has a sexual addiction.
Tuesday's violence has amplified fears in the Asian American community, which has already been experiencing a spike in attacks and harassment since the coronavirus pandemic began...
The murderer - do not say his name - allegedly visited the spas earlier. He knew where he was going and as soon as he got that gun (without background check, without waiting) he knew exactly what he was going to do.
No excuse he and his defenders throw out there should stick. He targeted Asian women (his rampage did include White women and two men), and he targeted women who did nothing to him except exist without his permission and outside of his dominance.
What the murderer did is no different from a lot of other murderers and purveyors of domestic violence. There is a serious problem in our nation - no, scratch that, when you consider what happened in the United Kingdom recently with Sarah Everard, when you consider how Turkey is formally removing itself from an European committee addressing violence against women (implying they no longer care and may even encourage it), when you consider rape as a war crime is happening in every civil war and border clash out there, there is a serious problem with our planet - when it comes to addressing the underlying misogyny to a lot of the violence out there.
Racism is a serious trigger for acts of violence, but the amount of violence committed against women ought to horrify you. How many mass shootings in the United States revolve around domestic abuse culminating in one final act of gunfire?
How important is it that we as a nation pass a Universal Background Check for gun purchases, and making sure domestic abusers are included in those checks? How vital is that our Congress pass a new Violence Against Women Act that should force our lax law enforcement agencies to treat domestic abuse as a serious threat to public safety?
Both of those bills have passed the House this month, thank God. But they're held up now in a Senate that debating whether or not to get rid of the Filibuster, a tool of obstructionism likely to block those bills from passing like the majority of Americans want them to.
God damn our nation's history of racism - not just towards Blacks and Hispanics but also tragically towards Asians from Chinese to Japanese to Filipino to Vietnamese and so many others - and God damn our species' history of sexist-driven violence towards women.
We need to make our laws act towards both injustices before more people - WE ARE ALL HUMAN BEINGS DAMMIT - are killed for the rage and bloodlust of angry white men.
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