The mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio

The Democratic debates have crystallized how far Democrats have moved to the left on all sorts of issues over the past few years. Candidates for the presidency advocated for single-payer health care, a Green New Deal, free college, 70 percent taxes on the ultrawealthy, decriminalizing crossing the border without papers, and upholding “reproductive justice.”

But there’s one issue, even as it’s gotten more attention, where major Democratic politicians haven’t moved much: guns. At the debates, most candidates raised the same ideas they’ve had for decades: universal background checks, an assault weapons ban, and keeping guns away from dangerous people. Only a few were active in calls to push further, such as Cory Booker’s support for requiring a license to buy and own a gun — which some candidates have joined in — and Beto O’Rourke’s promise that “hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”

On August 7 — days after gunmen using semiautomatic weapons killed 31 people in separate shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio — President Donald Trump told reporters he intended to respond to the latest outburst of deadly gun violence with new background checks legislation.

“I’m looking to do background checks,” Trump said, without providing any details. “I think we can bring up background checks like we’ve never had before ... [Congress is] getting close to a bill.”

Republican Sen. Martha McSally wants Congress to criminalize domestic terrorism — a move that comes amid bipartisan calls for the federal government to do more about the threat of domestic terror (and bipartisan concerns that the move could have unexpected, and negative, consequences).

On Wednesday — 11 days after a white nationalist shot and killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, injuring 27 others in an attack the shooter said was aimed at Mexican immigrants — the Arizona Republican released a discussion draft of a bill that would make domestic terrorism a specific federal offense. It would also require that the attorney general, the director of the FBI, and the secretary of homeland security submit a yearly report to Congress on domestic terror.

Democrats have a new strategy for keeping gun control at the top of Congress’s agenda: tying it to President Donald Trump’s fixation on his border wall.

Specifically, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is calling on Trump to redirect $5 billion in funds he’s requested for a wall along the southern border to fund gun control initiatives instead. The administration has requested these funds as part of the annual appropriations process, and Schumer is pushing for the president to change course in the wake of mass shootings in Ohio, California, and Texas in the past month. He’s expected to put in the official ask shortly, according to an aide.

An attempted mass killing at a mosque outside Oslo, Norway, on Saturday was allegedly perpetrated by a young white man who holds extreme right-wing views — and was seemingly inspired by last week’s El Paso attack that targeted America’s Latinx community.

Oslo police on Sunday said they’re looking into the shooting at the al-Noor Islamic Center in Baerum as “an attempted act of terrorism.” No one was killed because only three people were there when the assailant came in — though dozens were there just 10 minutes earlier — and the suspected attacker was overpowered by two men at the site even as shots were fired at them. One of the men who brought the shooter down is 65 years old and sustained the attempt’s lone injury.

It doesn’t make a ton of sense that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s team would tweet out a video of people making threats to him — or, really, that Twitter would decide that’s the moment to crack down on the account. But here we are.

Conservatives found yet another reason to war with social media this week after Twitter temporarily locked McConnell’s “Team Mitch” campaign account on Wednesday. The social media platform said the decision was made because the account had tweeted content that violated its “violent threats policy, specifically threats involving physical safety.”

The El Paso shooter told a detective after his arrest on Saturday that he was targeting Mexicans when he opened fire at a Walmart.

The shooter, who surrendered to police, revealed this during an interrogation at El Paso police headquarters, after waiving his Miranda rights, according to a court affidavit obtained by the New York Times.

After two mass shootings last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Donald Trump agree on something: They want a bipartisan background check bill to pass Congress. But the looming question is whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will agree — and whether it will happen before Trump changes his mind.

In comments to reporters Friday morning, Trump boasted he could get Senate Republicans behind a bill strengthening background checks for gun sales, and that his supporters would get on board as well if he told them to. (The NRA, for one, does not support an enhanced background check bill.) Trump said he had spoken to McConnell and claimed the Senate Republican leader is now “totally on board” with passing something.

It’s no wonder that the US attorney for the Western District of Texas said Sunday that the man who drove 600 miles to kill 22 people in the ethnically diverse city of El Paso, Texas, was being treated as a domestic terrorist. But it’s a largely hollow statement: The shooter won’t be charged as a domestic terrorist.

For many reasons, domestic terrorism in the United States — largely committed by people ideologically tied to white nationalism and white supremacy — is viewed differently from the international variety and has no specific penalties under the law. This fact has been the source of anger on the left for years — after the Oklahoma City bombings, for example — but some prominent conservatives have now coalesced around the same thought.

Republican leaders are again saying video games are the problem.

After two deadly mass shootings over the weekend in Ohio and Texas, which killed more than 30 people thus far, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said that “video games that dehumanize individuals” are the problem.

A man drove more than 10 hours to a Walmart in the Texas border city of El Paso Saturday, reportedly intending to kill Latinx people and immigrants. Minutes before he shot dozens of people, a racist, xenophobic manifesto appeared on the 8chan online forum, warning readers of a “Hispanic invasion” of Texas. Federal officials believe the shooter wrote it.

The language used to describe Mexican Americans and Latinx immigrants was shocking — not just because of the hatred and racism it revealed, but because it was similar to the language repeated by the president of the United States.

President Donald Trump is using a false equivalency to dismiss concerns over his rhetoric after the El Paso, Texas, mass shooting that left 22 dead last Saturday — one that was motivated by the anti-immigrant hysteria he regularly foments.

During a Q&A session with reporters ahead of his controversial trip to El Paso and Dayton, Ohio — the site of another mass shooting that left nine dead the same weekend — Trump pointed to the Dayton shooter as evidence that Democrats also share responsibility for violence.

Pete Buttigieg, the South Bend, Indiana, mayor and 2020 presidential candidate, released his proposal to combat domestic terrorism in a Medium post on Tuesday — and it could kick off a heated debate among Democrats about how to punish such crimes in the United States.

“An Action Plan to Combat the National Threat Posed by Hate and the Gun Lobby,” the first treatment of its kind during this election cycle, comes just days after the mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas — the latter allegedly animated by racism — which killed at least 31 people in total.

One of the unwritten but traditional roles of the president is to act as a “consoler in chief” during moments of national tragedy. Donald Trump, however, isn’t a traditional president.

On Wednesday, Trump is scheduled to travel to El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, two communities ravaged by mass shootings that happened on Saturday and Sunday and took the lives of 22 people and nine people, respectively. But whereas visits from previous presidents under such circumstances would typically be uncontroversial affairs, Trump’s is not.

In the wake of two mass shootings over the weekend in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, public debate has broken out yet again over the societal role of video games — as manifested in two competing hashtags: #VideoGamesAreNotToBlame and #VideoGamesAreToBlame.

In an incendiary White House speech on the shootings on Monday, President Donald Trump blamed “gruesome and grisly video games” for part of the “glorification of violence in our society.” His words echoed those of other lawmakers following the most recent shootings — and, more significantly, revived an argument that Trump himself has used multiple times following previous mass shootings, including the 2018 Parkland shooting.

The El Paso shooter is not a fluke or an anomaly. He is part of a resurgence of white nationalist violence in the United States, a wave of killings that are themselves part of a very long history of political violence by American racists and white nationalists.

In the years after the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups launched a wave of killings aimed at intimidating newly freed black people and restoring the antebellum racial order. Around the same time, an increase in immigration from East Asia and Mexico in the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to a wave of lynchings and mob violence targeting migrants, including large-scale race riots in Los Angeles in 1871 and in El Paso in 1916.

Rather than distance themselves from the immigrant “invasion” conspiracy theory that allegedly motivated a white supremacist shooter in El Paso to kill at least 22 people on Saturday, Tuesday’s edition of Fox & Friends indicated the hosts of President Donald Trump’s favorite show will continue to defend and reinforce it.

On Tuesday, host Brian Kilmeade — echoing the manifesto written by the El Paso shooter, who in turn drew inspiration from President Donald Trump — defended the use of the term “invasion” to describe migrants and asylum seekers crossing the southern border, saying, “if you use the term ‘invasion,’ it’s not anti-Hispanic, it’s a fact.”

As of Tuesday morning, this article is no longer being updated. For continuing coverage on gun violence, check out Vox’s gun violence section.

A gunman killed nine people and injured at least 27 in Dayton, Ohio, shortly after 1 am local time on Sunday. The attack was the US’s second major mass shooting in 24 hours, following another mass shooting in El Paso, Texas.

Americans are once again confronting the country’s unique relationship with guns.

On Saturday, a shooter killed at least 22 people and injured at least two dozen others at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. On Sunday, a gunman killed at least nine people and injured at least 27 in Dayton, Ohio, shortly after 1 am local time.

Former President Barack Obama called for more gun control and condemned racist rhetoric — including from “our leaders” — in the aftermath of the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, over the weekend.

“We are not helpless here,” Obama wrote in a statement posted on Twitter. “And until all of us stand up and insist on holding public officials accountable for changing our gun laws, these tragedies will keep happening.”

In America, guns in general are a big problem. But the mass shooting that took place early Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, is the latest illustration that some guns are bigger problems than others — even in situations when law enforcement is able to respond to almost instantaneously.

According to Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl, the gunman who opened fire in the popular Oregon District in downtown Dayton around bar close time was “neutralized” by officers a mere 30 seconds after he fired his first shot. But largely due to the .223-caliber high-capacity rifle with 100-round magazines he was wielding, 30 seconds was all the time he needed to leave nine people dead and at least 27 others injured before he was killed by police. CNN, citing Dayton officials, reported that the gunman fired 41 shots in less than 30 seconds, and stuck 14 people with gunfire.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, celebrity astrophysicist, is sorry for tweeting.

Over the weekend, after the mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, Tyson tweeted that the number of people killed in the shootings paled in comparison to deaths due to things like car accidents and that our “emotions respond to spectacle more than data”:

The gunman responsible for the mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, this weekend had a history in school of threatening violence against women, reports CNN. That makes him part of a long, familiar, and sad pattern.

According to multiple students at Connor Betts’s former high school, Betts kept a list of fellow students who he planned to target, CNN says. The boys’ names were on a “hit list,” and the girls’ on a “rape list.” Some of the girls listed were those whom Betts had approached for dates and turned him down, while others say they “didn’t really know” Betts and had no idea why he put them on his list.

In the days after a mass shooting in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, left 22 dead and more than two dozen others injured, local residents, community leaders, and elected officials have forcefully denounced the attack, arguing that the shooting was clearly rooted in racism and white supremacy.

Saturday’s shooting is being investigated as an act of anti-immigrant domestic terrorism by federal authorities, and it is possible that the suspected shooter, who has already been charged with capital murder, will also face hate crimes charges. On Sunday, John Bash, US Attorney for the Western District of Texas, said the shooting “appears to be designed to intimidate a civilian population.” A manifesto allegedly posted by the suspect used anti-immigrant language, referring to Hispanic and Latino communities as a threat to the future of the United States.

On August 4, a 21-year-old man opened fire at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart, killing 22 people and injuring at least two dozen others. The incident appears to have an eerie similarity with shootings at a San Diego synagogue in April and two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March: The shooters were spending time in the same dark corner of the internet, specifically, a site called 8chan — a notoriously difficult-to-police forum. But the El Paso shooting may finally change that.

8chan is an online message board that since its 2013 launch has become the home of some of the most vitriolic content on the internet. It characterizes itself as the “darkest reaches” of the online world in its tagline and has fostered a reputation as a nearly lawless space for free speech — however hateful or dangerous it may be — to flourish.