Far from the maddening crowds inside the Beltway green rooms, this gun-happy country is still stewing in a potful of rage and bigotry and the national id that the former president* let off the chain. From NBC News:
“I felt like this was the end,” Maria Garcia Sanchez said about the shooting, which was so shocking to her that she wasn’t sure what was happening until she saw her three-year-old grandson had been hit and sprang into action. “I turned to see, and the guy was at the window of the house,” Sanchez said Tuesday. “I picked up the child, and I hugged him in front of me, and I protected him because he wasn’t even moving his foot or head. And when I saw the man was shooting another, I turned him so that it didn’t hit the kid and wouldn’t hurt him more. And so I turned him, and when I did, it got my arm....It hit my arm and my head.”
Sanchez and her family are immigrants from Guatemala. Their neighbor Billy Booth, a seventy-four-year-old white man, found their presence objectionable. And he took direct action.
Five weeks before the shooting, the Guatemalan family told police that Booth had tried to start a fight and “flipped them off.”
At the time, Sanchez said, she told her son, who was being harassed by the suspect, to stop engaging with the neighbor.
“The guy went over to tell him ‘f--- you,’ and that’s when my son got mad and he said: ‘What do you want? Why do you talk to me like that?’ ” she said of the incident May 21. “I told my son, ‘Don’t bother that man. Leave him alone; maybe he’s bad.’ ”
It was that same boy who discovered Sanchez and six other family members down and bleeding after Booth had opened fire on their house. The only person who died was Booth, who iced himself. He apparently was a nasty bit of work generally, so it was a blow for freedom that he was able to arm himself.
Dave Hansen, who lives next door to Booth, said he did not believe the shooting was racially motivated. “I don’t care what the police say. I lived next to that guy for ten years, and he wasn’t racist,” Hansen said. “But I feel very lucky he didn’t shoot me.” Hansen said Booth fired a shotgun at members of the Guatemalan family after some kids walked onto his property to retrieve a soccer ball. He said Booth often antagonized residents over decreasing property values. “Anybody who didn’t take care of their yard, he was all over you,” Hansen said. “The last seven years were hell.”
All due respect to Hansen, but I’m less sure than he is that no racial animus was involved. But rage, bigotry, and that unleashed national id certainly were. And they’re here to stay.
