When President Donald Trump condemned weekend shootings in Texas and Ohio on Monday as barbaric attacks and crimes "against all humanity," he called for unity in condemning "racism, bigotry, and white supremacy," but offered no specifics.
Investigators are focusing on whether the El Paso attack was a hate crime after the emergence of a racist, anti-immigrant screed that the shooter posted online shortly before the attack.
The shooter was an American citizen, but WGBH News Analyst Charlie Sennott told Boston Public Radio on Monday despite the attack being treated as domestic terrorism, he may not be charged as a terrorist.
"There's still no terrorism charge connected to domestic hate groups," Sennott said. "We need to have that. We need to know that white nationalism, when it comes with an AR-15 to the door of a church or a synagogue, that's terrorism, and the manifesto put out on the dark web prior to this shooting was basically announcing a terror attack. Why aren't we calling this terrorism? Why aren't we mobilizing the full force of the federal government to really go after this network and crack down?
In his Monday news conference, Trump said he had directed the FBI to examine steps to identify and address domestic terrorism.
"We have asked the FBI to identify all further resources they need to investigate and disrupt hate crimes and domestic terrorism, whatever they need," said Trump.
While federal terrorism laws don't rule out prosecutions for domestic acts, the law has traditionally been used for cases with a foreign connection. The domestic terrorism definition was only added to the U.S. code in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks as part of the Patriot Act, when lawmakers were looking for tools to address foreign threats, thus framing most prosecutions in a foreign context.
An avowed white supremacist was sentenced to life plus 419 years on federal hate crime charges last month for deliberately driving his car into anti-racism protesters during a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. He was not charged as a terrorist, even though then Attorney General Jeff Sessions said his actions met the definition of domestic terrorism.
Trump also called mental illness a contributing factor to mass shootings in America.
"Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun," he said.
On gun control, a majority of Americans have consistently said they support stronger laws, but proposals have stalled repeatedly in Congress.
Sennott cited a study from 2018 that ranks America as one of the top six nations that contributes to global gun deaths: Brazil was 43,200, the US 37,200, Mexico 15,400, Colombia 13,300, Venezuela 12,800, and Guatemala 5,090.
Collectively, these countries made up less than 10 percent of the global population, but 50.5 percent of the world’s gun deaths, the study found.
"We're the worst in the developed world by far [for gun violence]," Sennott said. "No matter how you look at it, we are a country of guns and death and violence. ... Democrats and Republicans alike have not gotten enough done on this."
The United States has 10.6 gun deaths per 100,000 people, compared to the next closest in the developed world — Switzerland at 2.8, according to that same study.
Charlie Sennott is a WGBH News Analyst and executive director of The GroundTruth Project.
