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A man opened fire during a lunch reception at a Southern California church on Sunday, killing one person and wounding five senior citizens before being stopped and hog-tied by parishioners.
Four of the five people wounded suffered critical gunshot injuries during the violence at Geneva Presbyterian Church in the city of Laguna Woods, Orange County Sheriff’s Department officials said.
The suspect in the shooting, a man in his 60s, was in custody and deputies recovered two handguns at the scene, Undersheriff Jeff Hallock said. A motive for the shooting wasn’t immediately known but investigators don’t believe the gunman lives in the community, he said.
The majority of those inside the church at the time were believed to be of Taiwanese descent, said Carrie Braun, a sheriff’s spokesperson.
The investigation was in its early stages, Hallock said. He said the many unanswered questions include whether the assailant attended the church service, if he was known to church members and how many shots were fired.
Laguna Woods was built as a senior living community and later became a city. More than 80% of residents in the city of 18,000 people about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles are at least 65.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said on Twitter that he was closely monitoring the situation.
The incident occurred in an area with a cluster of houses of worship, including Catholic, Lutheran and Methodist churches and a Jewish synagogue.
‘Copycat’ Mass Shootings Becoming Deadlier
The shooting came a day after an 18-year-old man shot and killed 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
The white man appears to be the latest in a line of “copycat” gunmen carrying out deadlier mass shootings inspired by previous attackers, experts warned on Sunday.
Payton Gendron, who surrendered to police on Saturday after the attack, apparently publicized a racist manifesto on the internet and broadcast the attack in real time on social media platform Twitch, a live video service owned by Amazon.com. Authorities called the mass killing an act of “racially motivated violent extremism.”
Experts say the trend of mostly young white men being inspired by previous racist gun massacres is on the rise, citing recent mass shootings, including the 2015 attack at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, a 2018 shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and a 2019 attack at a Walmart in an Hispanic neighborhood of El Paso.
Adam Lankford, a criminology professor at the University of Alabama, has studied trends in mass shootings over time. His 2020 study analyzing victim data showed that the “deadliest” shootings – where more than eight people are killed – had doubled in number since 2010, compared to the previous 40 years.
“It’s clearly not just random. They are not people dreaming this up on their own. They are learning it from each other,” Lankford said.
He added: “They want to be like the previous attacker, who is a role model.”
As abhorrent as the new shooting was, it was hardly an isolated incident. The history of the United States is filled with white supremacist violence, starting from even before its official origins.
Black people have borne and continue to bear the brunt of much of it, but other groups have also been targeted in attacks because of their race, including Latinos in the 2019 shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, where 22 people were killed.
Gunmen with biases against religion and sexual orientation have also carried out targeted violence: the shootings at a San Diego synagogue in 2019 and a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016.
Experiencing violence of any kind is obviously traumatic, but the impact of targeted violence like this has ripples on a broader level.
“To be targeted for these things that you cannot control, it’s not only extremely painful emotionally, but it also impacts the way you perceive the world going forward after that,” said Michael Edison Hayden, spokesperson for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which advocates for civil rights.
Hate crime laws are on the books
in recognition of that reality. The effect of events like these is “you’ve increased the vulnerability of everyone who looks like the target,” said Jeannine Bell, a professor at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law. “This is a different type of crime because it impacts not just the victims, but also the community.”
While there’s always hand-wringing and dismay after incidents like these, that hasn’t translated into a commitment to address the bigotry that underlies them, said Cornell Williams Brooks, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and former president and CEO of the NAACP.
He’s weary of political leaders’ promises to do more about white supremacist threats and gun violence.
“Count the number of sympathy cards and flowers, prayers and thoughts that have been extended to the victims of mass shootings, to the victims of racialized violence,” he said. “Do we really need (politicians) showing up to our places of worship to help bury our folks and do nothing to stop the carnage?”
U.S. President Joe Biden said after the murderous rampage Sunday that hate remains a “stain on the soul of America.”
“A lone gunman, armed with weapons of war and a hateful soul, shot and killed 10 innocent people in cold blood at a grocery store on Saturday afternoon,” Biden said.
“We must all work together to address the hate that remains a stain on the soul of America,” he said.
