According to Sheriff T.K. Waters of Jacksonville, 21-year-old Ryan Christopher Palmeter, who lived with his parents in nearby Orange Park and had no criminal arrest history, bought a handgun in April and an AR-15-style rifle in June and used these weapons on Saturday to kill three people and then himself at the Kings Road Dollar General store. The manifesto he left behind has been described as “the diary of a madman.” His victims were black: Angela Michelle Carr, aged 52, Anolt Joseph “A.J.” Laguerre Jr., aged 19, and Jarrald De’Shawn Gallion, aged 29. Palmeter was white. He was also a racist.
Before the rampage, Palmeter appeared at the historically Black Edward Waters University around 12:45 pm. There, he equipped himself with tactical gear, including a bullet-resistant vest, mask, and gloves. His actions raised suspicions among the university’s security personnel, prompting him to leave the premises shortly after. Following his departure from the campus, Palmeter proceeded to carry out the shooting without warning. Amidst the chaos, he allowed certain individuals to exit the store before taking his own life.
Sheriff Waters said there were no red flags in this case. Both the rifle and handgun were legal and had been purchased legally. The firearms dealers―Wild West Guns and Orange Park Gun and Pawn—followed proper procedures in the sales. The shooter had come to the attention of law enforcement in 2017 in connection with the state’s Baker Act, a measure that permits the involuntary confinement and assessment of individuals for up to 72 hours when facing a mental health emergency, but uncertainties remain regarding the accuracy of the recorded Baker Act incident and whether it was categorized as a comprehensive Baker Act case. “In this situation, there was nothing illegal about him owning the firearms,” Sheriff Waters told reporters.
The corporate state is making the shooting about two things: racism and guns. It appears that racism was an element in the crime. Palmeter had composed manifestos that explicitly articulated his abhorrence for the black people and his intent to perpetrate violence against them. His rifle was adorned with swastikas. He specifically targeted black people before turning the gun on himself.
To punctuate the racial aspect of the crime, the media has noted that the shooting occurred on or around the anniversaries of two significant events in the history of civil rights, namely Ax Handle Saturday and the March on Washington.
Ax Handle Saturday took place on August 27, 1960, at Hemming Park in Jacksonville, Florida. The incident was a brutal attack on black protesters by a white mob. On that day, a group of black college students, led by civil rights activists Rodney Lawrence Hurst Sr. and Alton Yates, organized a peaceful sit-in demonstration at several segregated lunch counters in downtown Jacksonville. The students were advocating for an end to racial segregation in public spaces. They entered the whites-only lunch counters and attempted to be served, which was met with hostility from white patrons and counter-protesters. As tensions escalated, the situation turned violent. A white mob, including members of the Ku Klux Klan, gathered and began attacking the protesters with various weapons, including ax handles, baseball bats, and bricks. The police response was inadequate, as officers reportedly did little to protect the peaceful protesters from the mob.
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, often referred to simply as the March on Washington, was a historic civil rights event that took place on August 28, 1963, in Washington, DC. Organized by a coalition of civil rights, labor, and religious organizations, the march aimed to address issues of racial segregation, economic inequality, and civil rights for African Americans. The march is perhaps best known for being the site of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, where he spoke of a future where individuals would be judged by their character rather than the color of their skin. The event drew a massive and diverse crowd, making it one of the largest political rallies for civil rights in American history up to that point. The March on Washington helped build momentum for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which were significant legislative achievements in the struggle for racial equality.
At this point, I have no evidence or reporting indicating Palmeter planned his actions around these anniversaries. However, in tying the shooting to these events, the corporate media is perpetuating the ideological project to portray the United States as a country fraught by white supremacy. To be sure, it is crucial to continue the struggle against racism, but the United States of today is not the United States of the 1950s and 1960s. White supremacy exists in the United States, but it is not a significant problem. In fact, as I have reported on Freedom and Reason, in cases of homicide where the perpetrator is a different race than the victim, it is far more likely the perpetrator will be black and the victim white than the other way around. Video evidence of violent altercations indicating racial antipathy of black towards whites is voluminous. In addressing this problem, attention must indeed be focused on the problem of racial thinking. We must recognize that the antiracism rooted in identity politics is a racist ideology; identity politics manufactures racial resentment and antagonize people.
Along with leveraging the shooting to portray the United States as a white power project, the corporate state wants to make this about the availability of semiautomatic rifles. This is a red herring designed to advance the agenda of disarming the population, as well as creating the ability of propagandists to selectively identify ideology in motivation. That second piece allows for the horrific frequency of homicide in black neighborhoods to appear as occurring without human agency and therefore outside the scope of explanation; the fact that the number of those nineteen and younger killed by guns is driven by violence in black neighborhoods is obscured, with gun deaths framed the same way public health officials would talk about injurious and lethal pathogens, except where they can be attributed to the actions of mentally-ill white supremacists.
As I have admitted on this blog, I have been wrong in the past on the gun issue, repeating a logical fallacy that disappears the person who is actually the agent or cause of shootings and implying that an inanimate object has agency. The fact is that guns don’t shoot themselves. They’re tools like anything else—a means to an end. To understand the use of any means, we have to determine why the person seeks the ends he seeks. This requires a comprehensive study the root causes that explain why one human being kills another human being. In a large proportion of gun deaths, the shootings are perpetrated by those immersed in drug trafficking and gang society.
But elites don’t really care about why people kill people unless it is useful to the agenda at hand. The irrationalism in the debate over semiautomatic rifles makes it clear the motive of the state in arguing for bans and stricter regulations. More people are killed with feet and hands every year than are killed by rifles. The type of gun typically used in gun violence is the handgun. Yet the focus is on semiautomatic rifles. Why? Because handguns and long guns are not effective in combat against the high-powered weaponry possessed by the federal and state governments, and the corporate state doesn’t want the citizenry to be effectively armed to defend their liberty and their republic.
Everything that has been unfolding over the last several decades telegraphs the desire of the elite to dispense with democratic-republicanism and liberal freedoms and establish a totalitarian system of corporate governance. When they aren’t saying it out loud, the contempt for the American Republic exhibited by progressive Democrats is palpable. The framing of the rare mass shooting involving a white supremacist is amplified by the corporate state and media to heap disrepute on the American republic. The desire to disarm Americans is why it is so vitally important to keep the Second Amendment as free and open as possible.
freedom and reason 