Residents of Highland Park, Illinois, are mourning the now seven victims of the July Fourth parade mass shooting, when a gunman climbed onto a rooftop and opened fire with an assault rifle similar to an AR-15, spewing more than 70 rounds at people watching the parade. The dead include a married couple, Irina and Kevin McCarthy, who attended the parade with their 2-year-old son Aiden, who was found wandering alone after the shooting and smeared in blood. He was later reunited with his grandparents, who will now care for him. He was protected under the body of his father.
So, you know, this Highland Park massacre presents a kind of a different opportunity for us, because it doesn’t involve this white supremacist ideology that drove, for example, the Buffalo shooter, and we’re able to, like, look at it in a sort of a different way. It gives us a different angle on it.
And, you know, there are these fringe communities online, whether they’re white supremacists or they’re gore-related, in this case, where — you know, people use the word “meme” in talking about a memetic nature of the internet, where you don’t need the deep state to come in and radicalize you and put you on psychedelic drugs and get you in a state where you’re going to commit mass murder. People are volunteering for this. And they are subjecting themselves to people who are certainly already in a [inaudible] and subjecting
— source democracynow.org | Jul 06, 2022