For years, maybe even decades, every high-profile mass shooting in the U.S. has immediately resulted in partisan bickering between Democrats and Republicans, and ideological rifts between so-called liberals and so-called conservatives. Most often, both debates have largely revolved around the issue of gun control or gun rights, with the left arguing that the common denominator in all of these shootings is the weapon used to carry them out, and the right arguing that no amount of mass shootings should lead to the rights of gun owners being infringed upon.
Well, now, something else has been injected into the discourse around these events: identity politics. As long as mass shooters consistently turned out to be white men — which they still are the overwhelming majority of the time — conservatives were OK with completely ignoring the racial, ethnic, gender-related or sexualities of the shooters. But now, at a time when MAGA America is trying to push the narrative that non-white immigrants are causing a surge in violent crime in the U.S., and that the left is responsible for the most political violence — both being narratives are not backed with any statistical, non-anecdotal evidence — suddenly, every time the accused shooter is an immigrant, a trans person or allegedly left-leaning, those identities become the center focus of these shootings, along with the same old gun debate.
And it’s no different when it comes to the recent shooting in downtown Austin that occurred Sunday, in which a naturalized U.S. citizen from Senegal is accused of killing two people and injuring 14 others at a bar that “sits among several popular nightlife venues on West 6th Street,” according to the Texas Tribune.
From the Tribune:
Republicans’ rebukes of the immigration system came after media outlets identified the gunman, whom police killed within a minute of arriving at the scene, as a naturalized citizen from Senegal. The Department of Homeland Security said the man entered the United States on a tourist visa in 2000, became a lawful permanent resident by marrying a U.S. citizen in 2006 and was naturalized in 2013.
Many Texas Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbott, suggested the gunman wasn’t properly backgrounded before he was granted U.S. citizenship, but did not provide details of what should have prevented his naturalization. When asked about his criminal history, DHS only said the man was arrested in Texas in 2022, after he was a citizen, for “collision with vehicle damage,” a misdemeanor crime typically given when someone leaves the scene of a wreck.
The New York Post reported that the gunman, 53-year-old Ndiaga Diagne, was arrested for “illegal vending” in New York City in 2001. Citing unnamed sources, The Post said he was arrested in New York three other times between 2008 and 2016, but those cases are sealed. The Post did not report on whether he was convicted of any crimes.
Again, it is only when the suspected shooter is not a white man that white America decides everyone who shares a race, ethnicity and/or religion with said shooter should be treated like they are also guilty. It’s also the only time conservatives go this deep into digging around the suspect’s criminal history in search of past acts they can cite as evidence that they were dangerous all along. In Diagne’s case, they haven’t been able to find anything explicitly damning, so they’re pointing to vague, non-descriptive run-ins with the law he allegedly had, and allowing MAGA speculation to do the rest of the work.
If every time there was a Dylann Roof or a Payton Gendron that made headlines for a targeted white supremacist shooting — or shooting with a clear political motive — we collectively decided white men needed to be under a microscope, if not, rounded up and removed from the U.S. altogether, and then white men might have an actual reason to believe they are victims of systemic racism and discrimination. As it stands, though, the MAGA bigots and xenophobes are just projecting.
This is how white supremacy operates in 2026, simple and plain.
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