El Paso tells an uncomfortable truth about US mass shootings

This year alone the US has experienced 252 shootings. And while it would be easy to dismiss the crimes of Patrick Crusius and Brenton Tarrant as acts of the extreme far-right, evidence shows us that’s far from being the reality.

Following the horrendous shooting at a Walmart in El Paso over the weekend, many have begun arguing that a growing white supremacist movement is to blame.

At first glance, you can see why. Before his attack, shooter Patrick Crusius left a manifesto in which he praised Australian Brenton Tarrant for the Christchurch massacre and argued strongly against mass immigration — an issue routinely raised by the fascist arms of the far-right.

Somewhat paradoxically, though, the opposite is actually the case.

This attack was not the action of a man who is part of a growing mass fascist or white supremacist movement, but rather someone who is painfully frustrated that the very movement he wants to be a part of does not exist.

After a burst of activity and energy following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, organised far-right and fascist groups are now splintering and losing members in droves in part due to the backlash following the Charlottesville protests in 2017, effective anti-fascist campaigning and a crack down by social media companies.

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In turn, fascists and white supremacists have become demoralised and frustrated, losing faith in mass organising, and further disconnected from the political system.

Because of these factors, we’re now seeing fascists and white supremacists reinvigorate a model Vegas Tenold describes as “leaderless resistance”.

Texans held a vigil for victims of the El Paso shooting on Saturday August 3. Picture: AP/John Locher

Epitomised in the 1990s by the Oklahoma City bombing carried out by Timothy McVeigh, leaderless resistance is exactly what it sounds like — the resistance of individuals or very loose networks who decide to take things into their own hands and operate on their own. Academic theorists describe this as a ‘lone wolf’ attack — the actions of an individual who had no organisational backing.

Examine the manifestos of Tarrant in Christchurch and Crusius in El Paso and you can see this laid out clearly. Tarrant explicitly vented his frustration at the lack of mass far-right organising and saw himself as a catalyst, someone who could spark the energy to make the kind of changes that he wanted in the world before it was too late.

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In his manifesto, Crusius attacks both Democrats and Republicans, corporations and the general American public for their lack of action on a range of issues — from environmental protection to mass immigration. His ire is directed at everyone and he expresses a feeling of a needing to strike because no one else will take the action he feels is needed.

Both terrorists write that they hoped their attacks would spark further action and plead others to take the next steps.

The horrific decisions these men made were not those of people who saw themselves as a part of a large fascist or white supremacist group within society. If such a feeling was mainstreamed to the extent that it is often claimed to be, it’s possible neither would have seen the need to attack in the first place.

20 people were killed in the US’s latest shooting. Picture: AP/Rudy Gutierrez

Instead, these shootings were violent expressions from people who feel extremely frustrated towards society’s backlash against their ideas and what they see as a lack of action.

Of course, this does not mean that we should ignore this threat. The actions of these lone wolves have tragic consequences that go well beyond the initial brutal violence.

In the wake of the Christchurch massacre, violence against Muslims spiked, with many inspired by the shooting and The New York Times has shown a growing ‘network’ of these terrorists referencing one another in their manifestos and other statements.

Many clearly take inspiration from those who go before them, and more and more are seeing leaderless resistance as the only way forward.

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But if we are to take this threat seriously, we have to understand the specificity of it. Leaderless resistance brings particular challenges. A growing mass movement is easy to identify, mobilising on the streets and speaking publicly about these ideas. These men did not do that. Instead, they collected weapons and quietly planned actions on their own in a seemingly covert way.

Where they were engaged, however, was online on sites such as 4chan and 8chan, places which are particularly hard to track and control. They were deeply isolated individuals, ones who were hard to identify and stop before the violence occurred.

People like Crusius and Tarrant did not have a mass organisation in which they could participate, and so they got frustrated, and took action on their own. This does not lessen the threat that they, nor people like them, pose to our safety. The violence is horrendous. However, the particular type of threat they pose is often ignored in mainstream debate. To stop these massacres in the future, we need to pay attention to these details.

Simon Copland is a writer and podcaster.