Twitter Users Falsely Say Jacksonville Shooter Manifesto Was Released

Conspiracy theorists on Twitter spent the weekend insisting the racist shooter in Jacksonville, Florida who killed three people on Saturday was a part of a “psyop” someway organized by the U.S. government. As evidence for the speculation, many far-right accounts said the shooter’s manifesto was immediately released, while other left-wing shooters have had their manifestos withheld. What’s the one problem? That’s simply not true.

“Anyone else notice how we got the Jacksonville shooter’s manifesto inside hours of the ‘racially motivated’ incident, but we still don’t have the Nashville Trans Terrorist’s manifesto 5 months after they murdered Christian schoolchildren?” one account referred to as DC_Draino tweeted on Sunday.

“It’s an easy explanation: One boosts the regime’s racially divisive narrative. The opposite doesn’t,” the account continued, referring to President Joe Biden’s administration as a regime.

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Jacksonville sheriff T.K. Waters gave a press conference Sunday to elucidate the case. He also revealed that Ryan Christopher Palmeter, 21, shot three Blacks on the Dollar General in a racist crime. Waters says the shooter wrote “several” manifestos that “detailed the shooter’s disgusting ideology of hate.” Palmeter eventually turned the gun on himself.

“Plainly put, this shooting was racially motivated, and he hated Black people,” Waters said on the Sunday news conference.

Regardless of reports spread on Twitter, now known officially as X (the social media platform), where many individuals claim that the manifestos were released by the local authorities, these manifestos will not be available.

Online, right-wing commentators have repeatedly demanded that the manifesto for the shooter accountable for killing six people inside a Nashville Christian highschool in march 2023 be made public. Police haven’t released the manifesto, or another writings of Aiden Hale (the 28-year old who committed the crime before being shot by the police). And while many conspiracy theorists attempt to suggest there’s some nefarious motive behind not releasing the manifesto, the Associated Press points on the market’s no national standard for releasing such writings.

Many mass shootings, regardless of what their politics are, don’t share their manifestos online. But the arrival of the web up to now 20 years has enabled many violent attackers to post their hateful thoughts before they start their attack. The Jacksonville Shooter and the Nashville Christian School Shooter each didn’t publish their manifestos.

One example of hateful writings spreading far and wide is the manifesto shared by the shooter in Christchurch in Recent Zealand who murdered 51 people in two mosques before committing the attack. He posted it on 8chan. Along with the indisputable fact that the Recent Zealand police didn’t release this manifesto, in addition they made it an offence for anyone in Recent Zealand to have the document.

Every time mass shooters commit their heinous crimes, it’s only natural for the general public to have questions on why they did it. But shootings are so common and occur for such a wide selection of reasons that it’s hard to say there’s much public interest in releasing their screeds.

Gun Violence Archive reports that the U.S. had 476 mass killings on this past 12 months. Everyone knows that this high number is unheard of amongst wealthy countries. Some U.S. lawmakers will claim that our epidemic of mass shootings is a results of mental health issues or declining prayer. The U.S. has the best level of religiousness amongst wealthy nations. But, every country on the planet suffers from mental illnesses. Our variety of firearms is what sets us apart.

Americans have bought greater than 60 million latest firearms during this epidemic, which is an astounding number in a rustic with over 330 hundreds of thousands people. Our elected leaders have shown little desire to introduce latest regulations on guns, so this number is simply going to extend over the subsequent few months and even years. It’s as much as the police whether or not they release mass shooter manifestos. But there’s absolutely no evidence that releasing manifestos will help get our violence problem under control.