Jeff Binkley went to bed Saturday with the deadly mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, weighing heavily on his mind. When Sunday dawned, he found another city trending in headlines and on social media as the site of a mass killing – Dayton, Ohio.
Binkley, of Dunwoody, lost his 21-year-old daughter Maura in a mass shooting Nov. 2 at a Tallahassee yoga studio. In March, he started a foundation in Maura’s honor to research the intersection of mental health, hatred and gun violence. Binkley said he was still wrapping his head around the fatal shooting of three people at a food festival in Gilroy, Calif., only last weekend.
“Truly unspeakable actions have become commonplace,” Binkley said in an interview Sunday. “But then for these two to occur — El Paso and Dayton — within a 24-hour period. We’re still trying to process Gilroy and the sheer horrible nature of that.”
Previously: Dunwoody High grad identified as victim in Tallahassee shooting
Also: In deadly shooting, Dunwoody family finds a mission
The frequency of mass murder in this country, he said, has left people “just battered by this.”
Local, state and federal authorities in Texas were investigating the shooting at an El Paso Walmart as an incident of domestic terrorism. Twenty people were killed and 26 were injured. The alleged shooter, a 21-year-old white man from Allen, Texas, was arrested.
Investigators said they’re probing whether the alleged shooter is the author of a racist online screed posted shortly before the shooting that expressed fears of Hispanics gaining control of political power in the U.S. and in Texas.
The Dayton shooting came hours after the El Paso shooting. Police in Dayton said the alleged shooter there was killed by police after he killed nine and wounded more than two dozen in a popular nightlife district.
The two shootings came less than a week after a 19-year-old gunman killed three people and injured 13 others at the popular Gilroy Garlic Festival in California before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Motives for the shootings in Ohio and California are still unclear, but the Tallahassee shooting last year in which Maura Binkley and Dr. Nancy Van Vessem, 61, died was done by a man who described himself as an “incel,” or involuntary celibate. Police said he hated women and wrote songs with misogynistic lyrics and posted writings about torture, rape and murder online. The man also had been accused of harassing and groping women.
Jeff and Margaret Binkley unveiled Maura’s Voice Research Fund in March. The nonprofit, based at Florida State University where Maura Binkley was a student, is designed to fill a gap where state, federal and nonprofit dollars currently don’t go, and back research to better understand the connections between mental illness, hate and violence and how it all affects public safety.
The nation faces many domestic terrorism threats, Jeff Binkley said, including white supremacists, misogynists and people who hate others based on religious faith. Many of these violent people are radicalized online.
More needs to be done to monitor and stamp out threatening hate speech online, he said.
Domestic abusers and mass killers “have usually said and done things that people who know them, relatives and others, should be and are concerned about. It’s not that so many of these people are flying under the radar,” Binkley said.
Though understanding the causes of mass violence and enacting a broad spectrum of policy to combat them will take time, in the near term, Binkley said Congress can take steps to save lives.
Bipartisan “red flag” bills in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate would empower local jurisdictions to remove guns from people determined though court proceedings to be a danger to themselves and others.
On Saturday, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a co-sponsor of the Senate “red flag” legislation said in a tweet: “El Paso shooting is sick and senseless.”
“Time to do more than pray,” Graham tweeted. “Time to enact common-sense legislation in Congress to empower states to deal with those who present a danger to themselves and others — while respecting robust due process.”
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