Don't blame mental health

Katherine Hu , Opinion contributor
Published 5:00 a.m. ET Aug. 6, 2019
Updated 11:22 a.m. ET Aug. 6, 2019

... Many of us are unhappy with our lives, or struggle with mental health — but it doesn’t lead us to drive 10 hours from home, release a racist manifesto and target Hispanics at a local Walmart. What the El Paso gunman needed was for someone to offer up a scapegoat ...

Trump’s hate is rooted in plausible deniability, in his ability to deny responsibility for the actions of his supporters. He wants us to believe that he doesn’t understand the power of his words, that he doesn’t know they have the power to become bullets and knives and death threats. But he has seen countless examples of what his words can do.

Trump's comments toward four congresswomen to “go back" to where they came from were followed by a police officer saying that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., "needs a round.” In April, a self-described Trump supporter called the office of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., saying that he’d “put a bullet in her.” Later that month, when Trump tweeted a video of the twin towers to criticize Omar, the congresswoman said death threats against her spiked.

At a rally in May, Trump called out to the crowd, “How do you stop these people?” when referencing migrants. Someone in the crowd yelled back, “Shoot them!” while the rest of the audience cheered. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see a link between events like these and Crusius, who appeared to share images of the word “Trump” spelled out with guns and allegedly wrote about a “Hispanic invasion" of Texas, harking to Trump’s rhetoric about the “invasion” at the southern border ...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/08/06/el-paso-shooting-plano-senior-walmart-patrick-crusius-column/1922359001/