Robert Aaron Long, 21, a guy with some serious, serious mental problems, shot up three Atlanta metropolitan area ‘massage parlors,’ killing eight people, six of whom were of Asian descent. Four were Korean. Naturally, it’s being called a hate crime by the left, though the details don’t quite match up.

But that doesn’t matter; the Usual Suspects are all over this as a hate crime, as though any deliberate murder isn’t an act of hate. From The New York Times:

Why Some Georgia Lawmakers Want Last Week’s Shootings Labeled Hate Crimes

Violence that left eight dead, including six women of Asian descent, will be the first stress test for a Georgia hate crime law.

By Astead W. Herndon and Stephanie Saul |March 21, 2021

A year ago, Georgia was one of four states that had no hate crime legislation.

But the deadly rampage last week that left eight people dead, six of them women of Asian descent, is now providing a test of a law passed last year — and a window into the way that the state’s increasingly diverse electorate has altered its political and cultural chemistry.

Georgia, after earlier false starts, passed its legislation following the shooting death of a young Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, who was stopped, detained and then shot to death by white residents in a South Georgia suburban neighborhood.

Now last week’s shootings, in which Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with eight counts of murder, are providing a major stress test for when the legislation can be applied, what it can achieve and how it plays into the state’s increasingly polarized politics.

Political leaders, civil rights activists, and national and local elected officials condemned last week’s attack as an act of bigoted terror, drawing a connection between the majority-Asian victims and a recent surge in hate crimes against Asian and Pacific Islander Americans.

Mr Long has already been charges with premeditated murder. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Georgia not only has capital punishment, but carries it out, having executed 76 people since the restoration of capital punishment in 1976. An obvious question is: why bother to charge Mr Long with ‘hate crimes’ if there’s really nothing more they can do to him?

Law enforcement officials and some legal figures have shied away from labeling the killings a hate crime, saying there is insufficient evidence of motivation. Prosecutors in two separate counties are still weighing whether to invoke the hate crimes law.

If the evidence for a hate crime is weak, charging under the hate crime stature becomes problematic. It adds to the length and expense of any trial, and runs a serious risk of acquittal on such charges.

But that has not stopped the shootings from resonating as bias crimes for many in Georgia, a state that has been at the forefront of the demographic changes coursing through the South.

“I don’t want to draw any conclusions, but it’s obvious to me that if six victims were Asian women, that was a target,” said Georgia State Representative Calvin Smyre, a longtime Democratic lawmaker who helped shepherd the hate crimes bill through the General Assembly.

And there it is: it’s just obvious to Representative Smyre that, because women of Asian descent were killed, they must’ve been targeted because they were Asian. But sometimes, just because someone thinks that something is obvious doesn’t make it true.

Eight people are dead, and Mr Long has been charged with their murder. He is facing life in prison without the possibility of parole or perhaps even a capital sentence on those charges. If he is convicted on those, there’s nothing more a hate crimes rider can do to him.

But virtue must be signaled! My question is: if the killings of the six Asian women was so horrible, and must be charged as hate crimes, does that make the deaths of the other two victims somehow less significant, less important? Are the two non-Asian victims somehow less dead than the six Asian ones?