Amid a recent spike in anti-Asian-American hate crimes and acts of violence, many of which have been directed at older Asian-American women or Asian women residing in the US, we now have a mass shooting in Atlanta that, from the initial reporting on the casualties appears to be targeted against Asian-Americans.
#BREAKING Robert Aaron Long, the suspected gunman in the Cherokee County massage parlor shooting has been caught following a chase in Crisp County. Also, death toll now at four in Cherokee. @wsbtv pic.twitter.com/iIBJV7HcbO
— Chris Jose (@ChrisJoseWSB) March 17, 2021
From KIRO Channel 7:
ATLANTA — At least eight people were killed Tuesday after shootings at three spas in the Atlanta area, authorities said.
Update 8:52 p.m. EDT March 18: Robert Aaron Long, 21, of Woodstock, the suspected gunman in the Cherokee County massage parlor shooting, was caught following a chase in Crisp County, WSB reported. Crisp County is located about 175 miles south of Acworth.
Officials in Cherokee County have updated the death toll to four, bringing the overall total from all three shootings to eight.
Original report: At a news conference, Atlanta police Chief Rodney Bryant confirmed that the four victims at the northeast Atlanta spas were women and appeared to be Asian.
“It appears that they were Asian,” Bryant told reporters.
Bryant told reporters that police originally responded to a robbery call at the Gold Massage Spa.
While we do not yet have more information on the other four victims, as in if they are also Asian-American or Asian, my guess is that because the shooter was targeting massage parlors, we’re likely to find out that at least some of the other victims are also Asian-American or Asian.
I want to make four important points here as the reporting on this mass shooting develops:
- The Asian-American and Asian communities in the US are not monolithic. The identifying language – Asian-American and Asian – covers a tremendous diversity in ethnicities and, as a result, obscures almost as much as it reveals.
- Whether it is because Asian-Americans and Asians residing in America are considered to be a successful ethnic group or immigrant group by Americans who are not of Asian descent or for some other reason, attacks on these communities – from hate crimes to domestic terrorism – seem to get underreported. This is, itself, not that unusual. Until everyone was carrying their own camera and video recording device in their phones, crimes against Black Americans, as well as Latinx and Hispanic Americans was also under reported by the news media.
- I fully expect that this attack, because it involved massage parlors, is going to get rolled into the breathless news media obsessions and narratives, promoted by law enforcement, that these women were victims of human trafficking and/or were sex workers. So both victims and had it coming at the same time. We saw this bullshit narrative* in the south Florida arrests a couple of years back that snared New England Patriot’s owner Bob Kraft. And we saw it again in Tampa during this year’s Super Bowl. It is important to remember that Kraft was let off the hook regarding preliminary charges, but the Asian and Asian-American women involved with the spas that were raided in the stings all got charged for sex crimes.
- I will NOT BE SURPRISED to find out that the shooter was motivated by some bizarre conspiracy theory, related to QAnon or not, about human trafficking for the sex trade and his attack was motivated by that, as well as the recent attempts by conservatives to ramp up the negative rhetoric regarding the Peoples Republic of China in general and in regards to the origins of COVID-19 in specific.
If I see any updates, I’ll add them below.
Update at 10:05 EDT
CBS News has some additional details that, I think, are going to confirm my worst assumptions regarding this being specifically targeted at Asian-Americans:
Police said it was too early in the investigation to identify potential motives.
A shooting at Young’s Asian Massage in Cherokee County left three people dead and two wounded, according to the Cherokee County Sheriff’s office. The two wounded people were taken to the hospital, where one later died.
Later, three people were shot and killed at Gold Spa on Piedmont Road in Atlanta, according to Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant. While officers were responding to the scene at Gold Spa, they received another call for a shooting across the street at Aromatherapy Spa, where they found another person who had been shot and killed, Bryant said.
Bryant said all four victims from the Piedmont Road shootings were female.
Cherokee County Police identified Robert Aaron Long, 21, of Woodstock as a suspect in the Young’s Asian Massage shooting. Long was taken in to custody Tuesday night in Crisp County, Georgia, according to Cherokee County sheriff’s Office Director of Communications and Community Relations Captain Jay Baker.
Updated at 10:27 PM EDT
Apparently Trump went hard into the slur during his interview on Fox earlier this evening.
Trump even used an anti-Chinese slur during his interview this evening on Fox, just before news trickled out of a mass shooting in the Atlanta area that apparently targeted Asians and left 8 people dead pic.twitter.com/UY56F9WWxY
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 17, 2021
Open thread!
* I am not denying the reality that women, as well as some men, and children are trafficked for sex. As well as for other work. Nor am I denying the reality that a lot of the women working in these spas are, in fact, actual victims as they are being forced to do sex work to pay off the debt accumulated to get to the US. But there is a difference between the reality and the breathless, something must be done narrative that law enforcement and tough on crime politicians push and that the news media seems to have a gigantic sweet tooth for.
Also, sex work should be decriminalized. Flat stop.