A shooting broke out at a store in Jacksonville, Florida on Saturday night. The shooter killed three black people, before committing suicide. He was motivated by racial “hate”, according to the local sheriff. “He targeted a certain group, and it was black people,” Sheriff TK Waters told a press conference, saying the racial motive was “very clear.” Manifestos left by the shooter, who was in his twenties and white, detail his “repulsive ideology of hate”, according to TK Waters.
Swastikas were hand-drawn on at least one of his guns, he claimed. The shooter, wearing a tactical vest and armed with an assault rifle and a pistol, fired into the Dollar General store, the sheriff said, explaining that two men and a woman had lost their lives . “We know he acted completely alone,” he said.
The FBI will investigate the facts as a hate crime, Agent Sherri Onks said. The shooting took place near Edward-Waters University, historically attended by black students. A campus security officer spotted an “unidentified” man near the university library and “asked him to leave,” the school said in a statement. This man, who later turned out to be the shooter, had left the scene “without incident”.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, vying for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, called it a “horrible” crime and called the perpetrator a “rot,” while also saying the shooter chose his victims “based on race”. “This is totally unacceptable,” he added. “This guy killed himself rather than […] take responsibility for his actions, and so he chose the path of cowardice,” the governor continued.
The United States has more individual weapons than inhabitants, partly because of the ease with which Americans have access to them. One in three adults owns at least one weapon, and almost one in two adults lives in a household with a weapon. The consequence of this proliferation is a very high rate of firearm deaths in the United States, without comparison with that of other developed countries.
Several other shootings took place over the weekend in the country. Earlier Saturday, at least seven people were hospitalized after gunfire at a Caribbean festival in Boston (northeast), police said.
The day before, two women were shot and injured in Chicago (north) while attending a game of the White Sox, a Major League Baseball team in North America. And on Friday night, an argument on the sidelines of a high school football game in Oklahoma (center) degenerated, leaving a 16-year-old victim shot dead and four injured, according to local police.
US President Joe Biden was briefed on the events in Jacksonville and other shootings that took place within 24 hours, the White House said.
