‘Guns Don’t Kill People, Bullets Do’
What the El Paso shooter’s hyper-deadly ammunition tells us about gun culture.
The hyper-lethality of the bullets is the point.
Photographer: Michele Eve Sandberg/AFP/Getty Images
The “manifesto” purportedly posted by the shooter accused of last weekend’s mass murder in El Paso, Texas, is in many respects typical of the genre — a dim mix of self-pity, self-aggrandizement and sub-sophomoric musings making a stab in the direction of philosophy. The first section is aptly titled “About Me.”
The me-centric Texas man-child also included a section called “Gear,” where he weighs the merits of his consumer choices. USA Today explained: “The rambling online missive references the Wassenaar Arrangement Semi-automatic Rifles, or WASR-10, a Romanian AK-variant imported by some American distributors.”