Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose

Robert Aaron Long, the suspect in the killing of eight people at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area, acted alone and took responsibility for the killings, law-enforcement officials said.

Six of the victims were women of Asian descent, officials said.

Mr. Long, who is in custody, told authorities the shootings were related to a sexual addiction and that he had visited the massage parlors in the past, Capt. Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office said. Mr. Long told investigators that he blamed the establishments for providing an outlet for his addiction to sex, according to the sheriff’s office.

“It’s a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate,” Capt. Baker said. “He said it was not racially motivated.”

It always could be worse, and probably will be soon enough:

A man suspected of killing eight people at three Atlanta-area spas was headed to Florida “perhaps to carry out additional shootings” when he was arrested Tuesday night, Atlanta’s mayor said Wednesday, citing investigators.”This could have been significantly worse,” Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said in a news conference at Atlanta police headquarters.

And preliminary information indicates that the killings — of two Asian people and two White people — may not have been a hate crime, but instead may have something to do with the suspect’s claim of a potential sex addiction, Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds said at the joint news conference.

The toxic mixture of fundamentalist Christianity, and a nation that’s more willing to make sure nobody dies from eating contaminated lettuce than it is to keep tens of thousands of people from getting killed every year by guns means that freedom still isn’t free, or something.

. . . Oddly, killing women because they’re sources of “temptation” (i.e., women) doesn’t count as a hate crime, for reasons. . . Also the odds that these women weren’t murderously fetishized because of their ethnicity seem pretty low.