By Editor at NewsOne
The deadly mass shooting that broke out Friday afternoon at or outside of a grocery store in Arkansas happened in a small town with a predominately Black population.
Details of the shooting in Fordyce were still developing, but at least two people were killed and nine total people were shot by the gunfire at the Mad Butcher supermarket, according to news coverage from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. That number included at least one police officer who was “critically injured.”
The shooting took place around 11:30 a.m. local time.
Graphic videos posted on social media showed the shooting happening, including one of the gunman appearing to reload a rifle multiple times while firing off dozens of shots in several directions.
Neither the identities of the victims and their races nor the shooter’s motivation were immediately reported. The shooter appeared to be a white man. The fact that he was shot but not killed also fueled speculative confirmation on social media that the shooter must be a white man.
The details about the racial backgrounds of the people involved are important because U.S. Census Bureau data shows that Fordyce is about 51% Black.
Out of a population of 3,719 people, 1,886 of the residents are Black.
Fordyce is also located in Dallas County, which is home to 6,482 people, 2592 — or about 40% — of whom are Black.
Data shows that more than half of the mass shootings in the U.S. over the past 40 years have been disproportionately carried out by white males.
“Between 1982 and December 2023, 80 out of the 149 mass shootings in the United States were carried out by White shooters,” according to the Statista website. “By comparison, the perpetrator was African American in 26 mass shootings, and Latino in 12. When calculated as percentages, this amounts to 54 percent, 17 percent, and eight percent respectively.”
The shooting in Fordyce happened a little more than a week after a white man was on the receiving end of federal criminal charges for allegedly plotting a race war by targeting Black people at a rap concert in Atlanta in an effort to incite political violence.
The indictment of Arizona man Mark Adams Prieto, 58, under federal hate crime charges seemingly validates concerns of such violence recently expressed by Democratic California Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who said she was suspected that Donald Trump’s criminal conviction could embolden his followers to incite political violence.
This is a developing story that will be updated as additional information becomes available.
