TEHRAN - Another racially motivated attack in the U.S. has seen a white gunman shoot and kill two men and one woman at a shopping store in Jacksonville, Florida. All three victims were black Americans.

Saturday's attack bears all the hallmarks to last year's horrific mass shooting in Buffalo, where a white supremacist killed ten black people. 

It also took place on the same day, five years ago, when another gunman opened fire sporadically at a video game tournament in Jacksonville itself, killing two people. 

Authorities said on Saturday the perpetrator of the terror was a male in his 20s, armed with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and a Glock handgun, with at least one of the firearms painted with a swastika.

At a press conference, Jacksonville sheriff TK Waters told reporters that the attacker “hated black people”. 

“Too many Americans – in Jacksonville and across our country – have lost a loved one because of racially motivated violence,” he said.

He added that the shooter left behind several manifestos for the media, his parents, and law enforcement with extensive details of his hatred for black people. 

The writings of the manifestos have led investigators to believe that he committed the shooting because it was the fifth anniversary of the Jacksonville shooting.

The shooter had been seen at a historically local black college, Edward Waters University, where he put on a tactical vest and a mask before heading to his point of destination, a local branch of the Dollar General, a discount chain with stores across the United States.

There, he sought out his black victims and shot them dead.

There has been a rising number of hate crimes in the U.S. 

Data published last month by the research group Statista revealed that in 2021, 8,005 people fell victim to hate crimes in the United States, for which the motivation was race, ethnicity, and/or ancestry. In total, there were 12,822 hate crime victims across the country in that year.

Anti-Black or African-American attacks were the most common form of racist hate crime in the United States in 2021, with 3,277 cases.

This is while about 45 percent of the domestic extremist-related killings in the United States were associated with white supremacy. 

Also, in the same year, there were 948 victims of anti-Black or African-American intimidation hate crimes in the United States. A further 622 people were the victims of anti-Black or African-American simple assault hate crimes in that year.

This is, in fact, a vast undercount of the actual number of hate crimes, in particular intimidation or simple assault hate crimes, as these are only the documented cases that victims report to the police. 

Analysts say very few victims of such hate crimes actually tend to report the crime such as intimidation or simple assault hate crimes because they don't want the hassle of registering - what is believed to be a common everyday occurrence throughout the U.S. - with an institution that they either do not trust or, in many cases, they do not want to waste time registering and following up a case that rarely reaches the judicial system. 

Another system that has been documented as being racially discriminatory toward ethnic groups, in particular against black Americans, is the U.S. judiciary. 

When Black Americans are not being gunned down by White Americans, they are shot to death by white police officers. 

Following the angry and quite historic nationwide protests in the aftermath of the police murder of black American George Floyd, the number of black people killed by police increased over the last two years, not the opposite. 

Something which the mass demonstrations, led by the Black Lives Matter movement, had demanded.

That's according to data collected by the Washington Post, which shows police shot and killed at least 1,055 Black people nationwide in 2021. 

That is more than the 1,021 fatal police shootings of black people in 2020. 

George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer in 2020. 

Black people account for 13 percent of the U.S. population, yet accounted for 27 percent of those fatally shot and killed by police in 2021, according to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit group that tracks police shootings

Along with general hate, other types of hate crimes that have been documented in America include White Nationalists, neo-Nazis, neo-Volkisch, neo-Confederates, anti-Immigrants, anti-Muslims, male supremacy as well as anti-government movements along with a number of others. 

In 2022, 1,225 active hate groups were counted in the United States, 103 of which were active in California. The term "hate groups," according to Statista, includes groups that have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people. Their activities can include criminal acts, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting, or publishing.

In 2022, there were almost a dozen Ku Klux Klan groups in the United States. Statista has documented the extremist white group as again indulging in beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people. Their activities are said to include criminal acts, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting, or publishing.

A report released by the FBI in March this year said hate crimes in the U.S. surged 11.6 percent in 2021. 

The bureau said 64.5% of hate crime victims in 2021 were targeted because of their race, ethnicity, or ancestry bias, while 14.1 percent were targeted because of their religion. 

The largest number were motivated by anti-African American bias, the report found.

But uniform crime data released by the FBI in October 2022 contained gaps, with only 52 percent of U.S. law enforcement agencies reporting a full 12 months of 2021 information.

Among those hate crimes is the surging number of victims who are killed because the color of their skin is not white. And in that category, the most common type of weapon used to carry out the crime is a firearm. 

The U.S. is the only country in the world where there are more guns in the possession of Americans than there are American citizens. 

This has led to a record wave of mass shootings that have become commonplace in the United States. 

There have been more than 470 mass shootings so far in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The nonprofit group defines a mass shooting as any shooting incident in which four or more people are wounded or killed, not including the shooter.

With the vast array of weapons on the streets, racial injustice and growing prejudice against black people, mixed with FBI reports that only tell half the story, it all makes up a recipe for a troubling future ahead.