Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
On Saturday, a deranged madman took a firearm and killed innocent people at an outlet mall in Allen, Texas. We covered this Sunday morning.
As per usual with any breaking story, more gets learned as we update what we know.
Here’s the latest with the killer’s name redacted. There’s no reason to make these turdnuggets famous.
As investigators continue to probe for a motive in the mass shooting that left eight people dead and at least seven others wounded at a Texas outlet mall, details of the gunman’s background have begun to surface, including extremist social media postings, a source tells CNN.
Though authorities in Allen, Texas, have yet to publicly announce a motive for the gunman – identified by law enforcement as [name redacted] – investigators are considering whether he may have been driven by right-wing extremism, a senior law enforcement source familiar with the investigation tells CNN.
Rolling Stone has reported that the killer had shared white supremacist material in the past. While the killer is Hispanic, this apparently isn’t as far-fetched as I originally found the idea. The concept has been around for a bit, any way.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me–why say another group of people are better than the group you belong to?–but there it is. There are also questions about these findings in general, including some reports that there was no interaction on the social media accounts in question.
Of course, this is also a knee-jerk reaction to what they’re finding. We still don’t know a whole lot about the killer, who was shot dead at the scene so we can’t exactly ask him. Not without a Ouija board, at least.
Moving on…
The attack marks the latest in an unremitting series of mass shootings that have devastated American communities – everywhere from small towns to major cities – as they gather in schools, supermarkets, parks and other public venues that are typically deemed safe.
It also comes just three days after a shooter killed one woman and wounded four others in an Atlanta medical facility and only a few weeks before Texas will mark a year since 19 children and two teachers were massacred by a gunman at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde.
They left out the two within two days in Serbia.
It’s not just American communities feeling this, folks.
Back to this one, though, it seems the killer had worked as an armed security guard and has received at least some firearm training. His license expired back in 2020–I suspect a lot did that year due to the pandemic–and he hadn’t renewed it.
As part of his work, [he] received Level II and Level III security training. The former covers security laws in Texas; the latter, which is required for all commissioned security officers and personal protection officers in Texas, includes firearm training and the demonstration of firearm proficiency, according to Jonah Nathan, vice president of Ranger Guard, a security guard service in Texas not affiliated with [the killer’s] employers.
[He] also completed a separate firearms proficiency training course in 2018 which requires 6 hours of continuing education, according to the database.
Private security guards in Texas undergo background checks and are disqualified if they have committed certain crimes such as assault, burglary or sexual offenses, among others, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety website and state codes.
In other words, it sounds like there wasn’t really anything that would have precluded him from buying firearms lawfully.
This is also important because a lot of people are saying he was a gang member. That’s based on a quick take someone made based on a supposed photo of the dead killer, I believe. Even then, the evidence was shaky.
It would be great to blame this on some gang thing, to target MS-13 and call it a day, but that’s not really helpful when this isn’t a gang thing. Just as I hate gang fights being labeled mass shootings, I’m not going to call a mass shooting a gang thing without a lot more evidence.
This is just what we know now.
What we know tomorrow may well be different and we’ll try and stay on top of this story for as long as we can.
https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2023/05/08/allen-mass-shooting-n70233