(Newswire.net — October 3, 2017) — As the terror toll in the Las Vegas shooting reaches 59 dead and more than 500 people wounded, Americans are puzzled by the fact that there is a senior white citizen behind the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, Huffington post reports.
Police say that 527 people were injured and 59 killed at a music festival in Las Vegas when a gunman opened fire at the crowd from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel building, and then committed suicide.
Police identified the attacker as 64-year-old Stephen Padock, a local man described as a “normal” citizen that occasionally gambles in Vegas’ Casinos.
Police found 17 guns in the Mandalay Bay hotel room beside Padock’s body, and an additional 18 firearms, several thousand rounds of ammunition and explosive devices in his home in Mesquite, Nevada.
The FBI didn’t find any connection with far right organizations or religious groups, and they think that he acted alone.
According to a new report from The National Institute’s Investigative Fund and The Center for Investigative Reporting there have been almost twice as many terrorist attacks in the US between 2008 and 2016 done by white supremacists than by Islamist extremists.
In his address regarding the Las Vegas shooting President Trump, however, focused on radical Islamism as the greatest threat.
In a long history of double standards in media, the term terrorism is almost exclusively associated with non-white attackers, especially radical Islamists.
The New America Foundation, which has been tracking deadly terror incidents on U.S. soil since the Sept. 11 attacks, found an almost two-to-one ratio of attacks by far-right extremists to Islamist extremists.
According to the Foundation, 21 deadly attacks were associated with far-right extremists, compared to 11 by radical Islamists.
Attacks by right-wing extremists were also more often carried out with a deadly outcome, according the Foundation report. Some 13 percent of Islamist attacks resulted in death, while near 33 percent of white supremacists attacks resulted in death.
The number of people killed by Islamist extremists, however, excides the number of deaths caused by white extremists.