“This guy’s a bad guy. If I could take my gun off right now and lay it on this counter, nothing will happen. It’ll sit there. But as soon as a wicked person grabs ahold of that handgun and starts shooting people with it, there’s the problem. The problem is the individual.”
The Jacksonville, Florida, sheriff charged with overseeing the investigation into a racially-charged mass shooting at a Dollar General dismantled the narrative that guns are to blame for the tragedy.
“The story’s always about guns. It’s the people that [are] bad,” Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said during a press conference Sunday.
“This guy’s a bad guy. If I could take my gun off right now and lay it on this counter, nothing will happen. It’ll sit there. But as soon as a wicked person grabs ahold of that handgun and starts shooting people with it, there’s the problem. The problem is the individual.”
Ryan Christopher Palmeter, 21, is accused of carrying out a racially-motivated shooting that killed three Black Americans at a Dollar General in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Jacksonville on Saturday, according to authorities. He used an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and a Glock handgun during the attack, the sheriff’s office said.
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Officials said Saturday that the shooter had once been involved in a 2016 domestic violence incident and was once involuntarily committed to a mental hospital for examination. No further details were released on the matters.
