How To Tell If A Killer Is White

Ephrom Josine
7 min readApr 17, 2021

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It was not until roughly 6:30 P.M. EST when I first saw the face of Brandon Scott Hole, the man who killed six people inside of FedEx building the night before last. However, before the clock struck noon, before I saw his face, before I even knew his name, I knew the color of his skin. I have no doubt the media saw what color his skin was long before I did, and I have no doubt it influenced how the media talked about him.

This is because the first time I had heard of his actions was on MSNBC, the liberal network remember, where talking heads were not blaming his actions on him, but instead on the weapon he used on the FedEx workers. You see, the media tells us, none of this would have happened if it weren’t for guns. Because, of course, we white people are naturally non-violent, and it is only the corrupting force of a piece of plastic that can cause one to kill a fellow human being. And if you question this narrative, you’re a backward NRA supporting bigot who clings to your guns because you want to overthrow the government or something. It doesn’t matter that gun control was the first policy the Ku Klux Klan ever endorsed, it doesn’t matter that one of the first gun controls law specifically banned former slaves from owning guns, and it doesn’t matter that California’s gun control laws (signed by Ronald Reagan, by the way) were in response to the fact that the Black Panthers and other black groups were buying guns to protect themselves against racists (something encouraged by Martin Luther King Jr., who was denied a concealed carry permit in Alabama despite the fact he met every single written requirement), if you don’t support gun control you’re a paranoid racist, and if you give white shooters agency, you’re denying the real issue — which is that guns brainwash good white citizens into becoming killers.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: White shooters are given no agency by the mainstream media nor by either political party. The debate is always over “what caused this white man to kill,” and the answer can never be anything internal. He must always have been a fallen angel, corrupted by this world, because white people are seen as angels in our society, and as such one who does not act the part must have just had his wings clipped.

Before the Reagan Administration, the United States had a federally funded mental healthcare service. In fact, one of the last pieces of legislation Jimmy Carter signed into law, The Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, would have provided more federal funding to community mental healthcare services. Tell me, when was the last time you heard someone in either political party talk about bringing back the mental healthcare system? Republicans almost got there after Sandy Hook, when they said the actions of Adam Lanza were not the fault of guns (nor video games — especially ones he didn’t play) but of his mental state. However, as then-Senator Al Franken pointed out in his book Giant Of The Senate, this call was rather empty:

After the massacre at Sandy Hook, a number of my Republican colleagues responded by saying something on the order of, “This isn’t about guns. It’s about the culture and mental health.” As someone who’d been working on mental health issues since I got to the Senate, I knew that a number of these colleagues had never before expressed any interest in the subject. It was like they were checking off a box by saying the words “mental” and “health” and saying them in the right order.

Now, the federal government has done a couple of things that have helped the lives of the mentally ill. As Franken points out in this chapter, in 2008 it became required that insurance provide mental healthcare just as they provide physical healthcare, and after Sandy Hook, the amount of funding going to school psychologists was greatly expanded. However, there are still many ways we leave the mentally ill out to dry.

Here’s a rather confusing one: Did you know that, in the United States (the same one with the Second Amendment) a person who “has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution,” is banned from owning a gun? If you are hospitalized for depression at the age of twelve, it does not matter how old you are, it is illegal for a licensed seller to give you a firearm. This is in spite of the fact that, despite what the media is constantly telling us, people with mental illnesses are no more likely to commit a violent crime than the rest of the population (they are ten times more likely to be victims, however).

I know what you’re thinking, isn’t that a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which bans discrimination against those with mental disabilities? Yes, because it is literally discrimination against those with mental disabilities. Remember, Heller v. D.C. and McDonald v. Chicago both ruled that firearms are a constitutional right, but for some reason, our government has decided that those with mental illness are not entitled to the same rights as everyone else.

Some of you might also be wondering if this violates the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, which promises medical privacy to American citizens. Once again, I’d argue yes considering performing these background checks means someone who has no business looking into the medical history of American citizens is forced to do so.

However, all of this happened for one reason: The idea that a white person is naturally bad is simply unthinkable to those in positions of power. The idea that if we simply pass gun control legislation we can get rid of all violent crime done by white people has about as much truth as the idea that the death of Emmett Till could have been avoided, if only the races were segregated. (This was actually what Robert B. Patterson — the founder of the white nationalist White Citizens Council — argued in response to Till’s death in 1955.) In both cases, a tragic event is followed, not by condemning the white person who killed another human being, but on some other factor related to the killing. The white person is nothing more than a “victim of society” who was “brought to this” by outside circumstances.

It’s especially noticeable when you look at the arguments made at the Derek Chauvin trial over the past couple of weeks. Throughout the trial, the defense has been doing everything possible to make the death of George Floyd the fault of anything besides the officer who kneeled on his neck for nine-and-a-half minutes with half his body weight. It had to be the fault of Fentanyl (or even COVID-19), and the man kneeling on Floyd’s neck as he died from neck compression is nothing more than an odd coincidence.

However, even conversations about “police reform” based on Chauvin’s actions have fallen into this territory. For example, the idea that “the system” caused Chauvin to kill, as if Chauvin was just a good man who was corrupted by a broken police system and not a bad man who killed another human being. Now, I’m not saying that the police system has many issues (I spent all of last summer talking about those issues), however, many advocates for police reform have the issue backward.

Look at John Oliver’s segment on Police, broadcasted on HBO on 6/7/2020 while Black Lives Matter was at its height, as an example. Oliver shows a man named Dave Grossman telling police “only a killer can hunt a killer,” and that they have to “make that decision” to kill another human being around 1% of the time. Oliver says that “of course police who see that would end up on edge.” However, Oliver has that issue backward, it’s not that police are blank sheets that are trained by Grossman and his ilk, it’s that people who take Grossman’s training seriously are already in the police force. Our police force should be getting rid of people who would be attracted to Grossman’s teachings, and many police officers are. Many people who enter positions of power are simply interested in the power being in that position would give them, and people like Grossman are not corrupting them, they’re saying the quiet part out loud.

Michael Gerson, the head Speechwriter for George W. Bush from his first inauguration until June 2006, is credited for coining the term “the soft bigotry of low expectations” to describe liberal policies aimed to help minorities like affirmative actions. However, it’s impossible to think of a better phrase for the media’s attitude towards white killers than that. You are not expected to be not a killer, you are not expected to be able to stop yourself from being violent, and you are simply not able to engage in self-control because you’re nothing more than a product of your culture.

Is this the anti-white racism Tucker Carlson keeps warning about? Because it sure seems like it.

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Ephrom Josine

Political Commentator; Follow My Twitter: @EphromJosine1