Recent mass shootings in Georgia and Colorado in the United States once again placed the nation's lack of adequate gun control regulations and deeply rooted racism against Asian Americans under the spotlight
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 23rd March, 2021) Recent mass shootings in Georgia and Colorado in the United States once again placed the nation's lack of adequate gun control regulations and deeply rooted racism against Asian Americans under the spotlight.
Less than a week after a gunman opened fire in three spas in the metropolitan area of Atlanta, located in the state of Georgia, and killed eight people. Ten people, including a police officer, were killed during a mass shooting in a supermarket in Boulder, located in the state of Colorado, on Monday.
While the police in Georgia has identified the suspect in the shooting as 21-year-old local resident Robert Aaron Long, local police in Colorado has not identified the suspect who was taken into custody.
In wake of the consecutive mass shootings in a span of a week, US lawmakers from the Democratic Party renewed their calls for stricter gun control regulations, which they viewed could have helped avoid such tragedies.
In a statement issued after the deadly shooting on Monday, Democratic Colorado Representative Joe Neguse called on the US Congress to take meaningful actions to curb gun violence.
"While Congress dithers on enacting meaningful gun violence prevention measures, Americans � and Coloradans � are being murdered before our very eyes � day after day, year after year ... If we are truly invested in saving lives, then we must have the willpower to act and to pass meaningful gun reform. The time for inaction is over," he said.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York expressed similar calls for action in a post on his official Twitter account.
"This Senate must and will move forward on legislation to help stop the epidemic of gun violence," he said.
Democratic Representative Joaquin Castro from Texas, where gun ownership remains popular, advocated for gun safety regislations to be introduced by the US Congress.
"Yet another act of senseless gun violence. This time a gunman opened fire in a grocery store in Boulder and killed at least six people, including a police officer. Congress must finally pass common sense gun safety legislation," he said in a post on his official Twitter account.
The tragic shooting in Georgia last week has triggered a nationwide response to condemn racism against Asians in the United States, as six of the eight victims killed were Asian women.
The four victims killed at the Young's Asian Massage, a spa in Acworth, Georgia, have been identified as Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Delaina Yaun and Paul Andre Michels.
Four people killed at two spas in Atlanta have been identified as Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, and Yong Ae Yue.
According to US media reports, Tan, 49, is originally from Guangxi province in southwestern China and moved to the United States in the early 2000s after marrying her American husband.
Tan is the owner of the Young's Asian Massage and her family was preparing to celebrate her 50th birthday last week before the shooting took place. Tan's family have not informed her mother, who still lives in China, about her tragic death.
Hyun Jung Grant, 51, from South Korea was a single mother who was taking care of her two young sons on her own.
After she was killed while working at the Gold Spa in Atlanta last week, her two sons, Randy Park, 22, and Eric Park, 21, started a GoFundMe page to ask for financial assistance from kind-hearted strangers as they lost the key source of income for the family after their mother's tragic death.
Grant's young sons received outpouring support from over 72,000 donors who raised over $2.8 million for the grieving siblings.
Despite the shooting suspect's claims that he carried out the attacks on the spas out of frustrations over his sex addiction, the members of the Asian American community in the United States argued that Long's actions resulted from the misogynistic culture in the country that had long viewed Asian women as overly sexualized objects.
"This entire idea that you can reduce Asian women down to their sexuality that can be purchased, that is what's behind the idea of an Asian massage parlor," Catherine Chen, the chief executive officer of Polaris, a nonprofit group that operates the National Human Trafficking Hotline, said during an interview with the Detroit Free Press.
Elizabeth Kim, the chief operating officer of Restore NYC, a nonprofit that works to provide housing and economic solutions for survivors of trafficking, pointed out that it's impossible to separate racism from misogyny completely.
"The racism and the misogyny and the violence are very much intertwined," Kim said. "I wouldn't say we should pivot to say it is a crime only in sexual nature and not of a racial nature and vice-versa. I don't think it's fair right now to say it was one versus the other," she was quoted by the Detroit Free Press as saying.
In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, May-lee Chai, an associate professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University, shared her personal story about how she was suspected to be a sex worker by local police officers shortly after she moved to North Carolina for a teaching position.
When she opened the door to two uniformed police officers, they both insisted on taking a look into her apartment to make sure "she was not being held against her will."
"The most recent example of this objectification of Asian women's bodies came after six Asian women were shot and killed Tuesday in Georgia.... Press reports have said that the suspect, Robert Aaron Long, claimed he had a 'sex addiction,' as if that would excuse murdering Asian women," Chai wrote in the op-ed.
The police in Georgia have not indicated whether the three spas targeted in the shooting offered illicit sex services. But all of the three spas received reviews on Rubmaps, an erotic review site that allows users to search for and review illicit massage parlors.
Nevertheless, the devastating violence against Asian women in Georgia became a rallying point for the Asian American community to raise awareness of the racism they had been struggling with.
Mass protests calling for "Stop Asian Hate" erupted nationwide in the United States, while a large number of US politicians and celebrities joined the campaign on social media to spread the message.
Both US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris visited Atlanta on Friday and met with local Asian American community leaders to extend their support.
The tragic shooting in Georgia took place amid rising violent attacks against Asian Americans, who were targeted over anxiety caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, former US President Donald Trump had always tried to blame China for causing the global outbreak by calling the new coronavirus the "China Virus" or the "Chinese Virus."
