Is the media trying to sell the white nationalist Hispanic line again? It appears they are in the aftermath of the tragic mass shooting in Texas.
Mauricio Garcia, 33, killed eight people at the Allen Premium Outlets. He was killed by a police officer responding to an unrelated emergency call. The images are heinous, but now that we’ve identified the shooter, we’ve learned more about his personal history, which included racist and antisemitic posts. He reportedly had neo-Nazi sympathies, so the media is trolling, hoping to hook the public into this pseudo-intellectual narrative about nonwhites being white supremacists.
The first vestiges of this nonsense stem back to the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. The shooter, George Zimmerman, was charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter but was acquitted. The incident became a national spectacle, with then-President Obama weighing in, which only magnified the shooting. Zimmerman was described as a “white Hispanic,” coupled with multiple instances of journalistic malpractice, including MSNBC editing the 911 tapes to make Zimmerman appear racist.
The media hasn’t learned, as they’re now trying to frame Garcia as a neo-Nazi despite the obvious reasons why this is a fallacy. Nonwhites can’t be Nazis, nor can they ever be. Did Garcia post some awful social media posts? Sure, but is this because he’s a Nazi (in his mind), or is the mental illness shining through? Garcia confessed that no mental health professional could help him. In 2008, he was discharged from the US Army over mental health concerns.
What’s more commonly seen with mass shooters: mental illness or neo-Nazism? It’s not the latter, not even close. Most mass shooters, especially the ones that nabbed the headlines, exhibited severe mental health problems before their rampages. Others have the tragic happenstance of being preventable, as we saw in Highland Park, Illinois, Sutherland Springs, Texas, and Parkland, Florida.
Robert Eugene Crimo III, the Highland Park shooter in 2022, obtained his weapons after his father co-signed his firearm owner identification card (FOID), which was after multiple visits by police, including one where his knives were confiscated after he made threats against his family; he threatened to kill them. His parents didn’t press charges, so no red flags were raised during the FOID process.
Devin Patrick Kelley, who committed the Sutherland Spring shooting in 2017, obtained his AR-15 rifle because nothing came up during his background check. Kelley, a US Air Force veteran, who had served a year in jail for domestic abuse, would have been prohibited from purchasing the firearm if the military filed the proper paperwork. Instead, Kelley’s charges, court-martial, and jail sentence were omitted.
Nikolas Cruz, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooter in 2018, had red flags and mental health issues abound, but state, local, and federal agencies failed to reel him in. Of all the recent mass shootings, Parkland is probably the most glaring regarding preventability.
And what’s the left’s evidence for the rise of white nationalist Hispanics? Nothing other than the ramblings of a mentally ill man in Allen, Texas, and the founder of the Proud Boys, whose profile has been greatly assaulted by the liberal media who thinks they’re some fifth-column group capable of toppling the government — not even close.
Talking about the glaring deficiencies in our mental health system is hard, so the left doesn’t want to debate that. Pervasive hyperbole about Latino white nationalists is easier because the former topic is loaded with nuance and rewriting procedures, ensuring that rights aren’t trampled. It’s a long process, whereas firing the racism flares is a quick and easy rating bump. The left feigned supporting an overhaul but ran too quickly on red flag laws, which are ripe for abuse as written in most states.
Until half the country sees that addressing mental illness and bolstering the FBI’s Instant Criminal Background Check System to accommodate changes to incorporate one’s mental health history without trampling on a host of privacy laws, we’ll never get there.
There must be a better way to shore up this system vis-à-vis mental health; we owe the public to at least try. We’re at the table. We’ve been sitting here for years, but Democrats would instead use the NICS system to establish a national registry as the basis to execute confiscatory measures, and that’s a deal breaker.
What happened in Allen, Texas, remains a mental health issue, which is the real dilemma, not fake Hispanic Nazis, which are figments of academia’s imagination.