A gun with a swastika engraved on it, a poster against African Americans, an assault rifle. There is again theracial hatred behind the nth massacre in the United States, a seamless trail of blood that too often sees the African-American community as the chosen victim of white supremacists. The latest mass shooting occurred late Saturday morning in Jacksonville, Fla, on the day of the fifth anniversary of another massacre in the city and on the day in which thousands of people took to the streets of Washington to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the famous ‘I have a dream’ speech given by Martin Luther King for the racial equality and rights. A white boy in his twenties, dressed in war gear and armed with an assault rifle and a pistol, enters a Dollar General store, near the campus of Edward Waters University, a small historically African-American university, and barricades himself inside and opens fire. Three victims, two African-American men and a woman, fell under the blows of the killer who then turned the Nazi gun on himself and killed himself. Before carrying out the massacre he called his parents and asked them to spread his racist manifesto on the media and social media in which he declared that he “hated children and wanted to kill them”.
A massacre that has probably been prepared for months, down to the smallest details, which will now be up to the FBI to analyze to understand how and when the twenty-year-old killer became radicalised. Only in May last year, another massacre motivated by racial hatred. 19-year-old supremacist Payton Gendron kills 10 African Americans in a live-streamed shooting at a Buffalo supermarket. But since the beginning of the year, there have been hundreds of shootings throughout the United States and Joe Biden’s appeals to Congress to pass more restrictive laws on the possession of weapons, especially “war” weapons like the American president, have fallen in vain. he defined assault rifles. Shootings in shopping malls, schools, cinemas or on the streets, the bloodshed in the US seems to have never stopped in the first half of 2023 with a death toll that has increased almost every week. In addition to the massacre in Jacksonville, on Saturday alone there was a shooting during the Caribbean carnival in Boston with seven injured and another at a high school football game in Choctaw, Oklahoma in which a sixteen-year-old was killed.