Despite the routine armed violence in the United States, the two shootings registered in California in less than 48 hours, with a mournful balance of 18 deaths, provoke surprise.
In this daily tragedy –there are already 39 mass shootings in 2023, with another three fatalities on Tuesday in Yakima (Washington)–, the horror of this pair of massacres is not limited only to the number of deaths or the proximity between both misdeeds.
The astonishment has increased due to the similarities between the two cases and the unusual profile of the alleged perpetrators, two elderly Asian men.
Huu Cann Tran, 72, caused 11 deaths at a Chinese New Year party in Monterey Park near Los Angeles. Tran committed suicide after being disarmed by "a hero" in another room in the Alhambra.
This all happened on Saturday night. On Monday afternoon, Chunli Zhao, 66, opened fire at two mushroom farms on the outskirts of Half Moon Bay, a rural enclave 30 miles from San Francisco.
“This is workplace violence,” San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus explained yesterday. The alleged perpetrator, detained in his vehicle when he was in the parking lot of the police office, was an employee of one of those businesses and his action responded to "a specific objective."
In the first place, it left four dead, and another three in the second, very close to the previous one. One wounded was hospitalized.
The seven victims were a mix of Asians and Hispanics, said Lt. Eamon Allen, a police spokesman. He also maintained that "we already knew" Zhao from his background, although he added that "we never imagined that he would do something like this."
Like Tran, his crime was committed with a semi-automatic pistol. This also makes a difference. Younger offenders generally prefer to use military-style rifles, such as AR-15s.
According to the Rand Corporation, between 1976 and 2018, the median age of these gunmen was below 45. But The Violent Project, a non-profit organization, lowers that average age to 32 years. According to this institution, the defendant from Monterey Park is two years older than the one who until now was listed as the oldest perpetrator of a mass shooting, dating back to 1981, in Kentucky.
Zhao was described as a "grieved employee." Everything indicates that Tran acted out of his resentment with the dance halls he went to, where he had been a client and where he apparently met his ex-wife.
