January 2023 will be remembered as a murderous month. Forty mass shootings were committed in the United States and more than 60 people died.
As defined by the Gun Violence Archive, a mass shooting is an incident in which at least four victims are injured or killed, not including the perpetrator.
Sadly, it was a coast-to-coast phenomenon. But I find myself thinking about two tragedies suffered in separate California communities just two days apart. The shootings claimed the lives of 18 people and injured 10 more.
On Jan. 21, a gunman opened fire at Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park. The attack left five men and six women dead and nine people wounded. Then, on Jan. 23, another gunman killed five men and two women at two mushroom farms in Half Moon Bay. Another man was critically injured.
The two mass shootings — just hundreds of miles apart in our state — share distressing similarities. Both alleged shooters were men of Asian descent over age 60. Nearly all the victims of the Monterey Park attack appear to be of Asian descent, too. In the Half Moon Bay shootings, police said the victims were Asian and Hispanic.
While taking someone else’s life is already inexplicable, I’ve been wondering why these men would murder people of their own race. Somehow, it seemed especially surprising in the aftermath of the pandemic, when hate crimes proliferated at the hands of people who blamed the entire Asian race because COVID, it was believed, started in China.
But federal crime data show more often than not, murder is intraracial.
As David M. Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, explained, “Homicides overwhelmingly happen among people who know each other. (It’s) a phenomenon of social networks. Most people’s relationships are primarily with someone of their own race or ethnicity. As long as anybody has studied homicide, this has been the pattern.”
In 2018, the most recent year for which FBI…
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