The School Shooting, Another Angle

For John, BLUF:  A reporter for The LA Times was "shocked" that the shooter in Uvalde, Texas, was an American of Hispanic heritage.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

---

Los Angeles Times Columnist Can’t Believe Texas Shooter Was Latino

Here is the sub-headline:

Gustavo Arellano blames American values for shooter's bloody rampage

From The Washington Free Beacon, by Washington Free Beacon Staff, 27 May 2022, 1:20 pm.

Here is the lede plus three:

A Los Angeles Times columnist expected the Texas elementary school shooter to be a "white supremacist" and was disappointed to learn he was a Latino.

"When I heard that a gunman had killed multiple schoolchildren in a predominantly Latino town in Texas, I immediately thought: white supremacist," Gustavo Arellano wrote in a Wednesday column. "How could I not?"

Arellano said his "stomach dropped" when he learned the mass shooting was in fact carried out by an 18-year-old Latino named Salvador Rolando Ramos. In an attempt to explain why a "Latino-on-Latino mass school shooting" would take place, Arellano blamed the tragedy on Ramos's assimilation into American culture.

"What Ramos did—stemming from a pathology found almost nowhere else on Earth—is as American as apple pie."

The LA Times Reporter has a good point.  The shooter had adapted to US Culture.

On the other hnd, Reporter Gustavo Arellano seems ignorant of a nation 144 mile south of the LA Civic Center, the United Mexican States.  A nation where drug cartels run big patches of territory and peole disappear.  For example, on 26 September 2014, students from a teacher training school in rural southern Mexico commandeered some buses, with an ultimate destination of Mexico City, for a demonstration.  Two buses disappeared enroute and 43 of the students went missing, to be tortured and killed.

Not every Latin American culture is like that, but to think the United States stands along in the Whestern Hemisphere in terms of violence and the use of guns is to reveal ignornce.

However, Reporter Arellano is spot on to identify culture as a part of the equation.  Our culture has shifted in the last 60 years and not for the better.  We thought we were making things better, but we were not.  I went to High school in LA County and for two of those years was on the High School Rifle Team.  I took my 22 Caliber Rifle to school on dzys we went to the range.  No big deal.  What changed?

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff