The EconomistAugust 10th 2019 191T
hey lookedlike something out of Do-
nald Trump’s fever dream: a bunch of
burly, bearded, tattooed Latinos massed
outside a blood bank wielding metal ob-
jects. But the objects were spoons and spat-
ulas, and the men were Christians on a
mission. Soon after a gunman killed nearly
two dozen people at a Walmart, Pastor An-
thony Torres and members of his flock
stocked their mobile kitchen and drove
down from Alamogordo, New Mexico. In
the two days that followed they served
hundreds of meals to El Pasoans who do-
nated badly needed blood to local hospi-
tals. Asked why he brought nearly a dozen
people, a mobile kitchen and hundreds of
dollars-worth of food to another city to
help people he had never met, Mr Torres
just shrugs: “We felt we had to be here.”
The El Paso massacre was the deadliest
of three in less than a week—all perpetrat-
ed by young men using legally purchased
semi-automatic weapons. The death toll,
including two shooters, stood at 36: 22 in El
Paso, four at a festival in Gilroy, California
and ten in Dayton, Ohio, with dozens left
injured. America has grown accustomed to
such events. There have been 31 shootings
with three or more deaths in 2019. On aver-
age, according to a research outfit called
the Gun Violence Archive, this year has
seen one shooting in which four or more
people were killed or injured every day.
Two of these attacks—in Gilroy and El
Paso—are being investigated as domestic
terrorism, raising questions about how po-
lice and politicians confront the threat
from white-supremacist terror. On July
23rd Christopher Wray, the fbi director,
said his agency had made around 100 do-
mestic-terror arrests since October, most
of them related to white supremacists. Yet
even though, according to the Anti-Defa-mation League, an ngo, right-wing ex-
tremists were responsible for 70% of kill-
ings apparently motivated by some
extremist ideology in America between
2009 and 2018, the counterterrorism appa-
ratus remains geared more towards catch-
ing foreign terrorists than domestic ones.
That stems partly from a legal distinc-
tion. Providing money or personnel to a
designated foreign-terrorist group such as
al-Qaeda or isisis illegal. No such statute
exists for domestic terrorism, and in any
case white-supremacist attacks are carried
out by individuals who buy their own guns
and radicalise themselves online. Initiat-
ing a terrorism investigation based on
opinions posted on web forums gets into
murky First Amendment waters.
But the imbalance also stems from pri-
orities set at the top. Former counterterror-
ism analysts say that the government does
not devote nearly as much intellectual en-
ergy to understanding the ideology of do-
mestic white supremacists, and mapping
out paths from ideology to action, as it does
to jihadist terrorism—even though, as
Clint Watts, a former fbispecial agent who
worked on terrorism, notes, the two ideol-
ogies are structurally similar. Both argue
that they—Muslims in one case, white peo-
ple in another—are superior, and need
their own separate state ruled by their own
people, and are justified in committing
acts of violence in their people’s name.
Despite that passing similarity, the path
to radicalisation seems different. JihadistMass shootings
The definition of insanity
EL PASO
America grapples with a lethal mix of terrorism and lax gun laws
United States
20 On malign words
21 America’s most interesting sheriff
22 Life after coal in Wyoming
23 Lexington: Rowing about rightsAlso in this section