The shooting at the annual Gilroy Garlic Festival on Sunday, July 28, in California has led to renewed calls for more gun safety measures. It has also led to the now threadbare statements of thoughts and prayers from political officials who foment the kind of anger and espouse the kind of policies that lead to mass shootings. The shooting, perpetrated by 19-year-old Gilroy native Santino Williams Legan, left three people dead: Stephen Romero, 6; Keyla Salazar, 13; and Trevor Irby, 25. Legan was shot and killed by police.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that white supremacist reading materials as well as “the makings of a massive attack” have been discovered at Legan’s home in Nevada, as investigators go through and try to make sense of the anger, ignorance, and violence demonstrated this past Sunday. According to the Chronicle, while the search warrant makes no mention of the racist materials recovered by the FBI, anonymous federal law enforcement sources say that “reading material on white supremacy and radical Islam,” were discovered, along with a gas mask, bulletproof vest, and empty ammunition boxes. News that “extremist” reading materials were found at the suspect’s home is not surprising after reports that Legan was telling people on his social media accounts to read an obscure racist 1800s book called Might Is Right.
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FBI Deputy Special Agent Craig Fair told the Associated Press, "I would say that we are not closer to understanding that motive, what happens within the psyche of a 19-year-old kid. I can't speak to that. Determining the motive is an exceptionally important thing for law enforcement to try to understand one, why they did it, and two, are they acting in collaboration with any other individuals. Are they inspired by some other organization? Were they radicalized online? What were the real factors that induced this person to take this kind of heinous action."
How 19-year-old Legan came to his motivation is not the same as what his motivation was. Legan’s motivation is the same motivation that all white supremacist domestic terrorists have: self-aggrandizement by terrorizing people he believes are in some perverse way the cause of his pain and sadness and anger. Pussy-footing around this does a disservice to the dead and their families. Santino Williams Legan was a racist domestic terrorist with access to legal weapons.