Another shooting. What story will we tell ourselves this time?

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The real estate agent told me she was born and raised in Texas. Knowledgeable and full of warmth, she embodied all the honey-sweet southern charm country stars like Morgan Wallen sing about.

I went to San Antonio to explore the city and came upon a 112-year-old estate for sale. Though I wasn't interested in buying the house, I was interested in its history.

Who had it built?

What did the area look like when ground broke?

Everything has a story ... some of them are even true.

Every person has a story as well.

And in the agent's story, Black people in 1910 were having breakfast inside immaculate colonial houses in Texas.

I'm sure she didn't mean to offend. I'm sure she was just searching for a way to steer me to a connection to the house in hopes of making a sale. But I had already found a connection — in the tiny room that served as servant quarters.

I didn't bother to shred her romanticized version of Jim Crow America with all the reasons why I could not have eaten breakfast in that nook in 1910. Instead, I simply said "No, I can't."

Everyone has a story. But not all of them are true.

Will you dub him a "lone wolf"? A symptom of some new violence brewing? An example of the violence that's always been?

I am horrified by the shooting in Buffalo, but I am not shocked. Accepting gun violence is one of America's pastimes after all. Sunday's shooting at a church in Laguna Woods, Calif., that killed one person and critically injured four came a day after the Buffalo carnage. The shootings in downtown Milwaukee that left 21 wounded came the day before.

This year's number of mass shootings has already reached 198.

If not acceptance, then what story are you telling yourself about gun violence in America?

And what did you say in 2019 after 22 people were killed at a Walmart in El Paso, allegedly by a person who was targeting Latinos? What did you say to yourself in 2018 after a gunman killed 11 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, allegedly by a person who told police he wanted all Jews to die?

According to a 180-page manifesto attributed to Gendron, the suspect was motivated by "replacement theory"— the idea that whites are being systematically replaced by minorities and immigrants. The xenophobic conspiracy theory used to be on the fringe but is now undeniably a part of the Republican platform. Tucker Carlson pushes it regularly on his popular show on Fox News. Elected officials such as Rep. Matt Gaetz support it on social media. A sitting president characterized white nationalists doing Nazi salutes and chanting "Jews will not replace us" as very fine people. But the story is critical race theory, right?

My chat with the agent in the San Antonio house reminded me of the interview between broadcaster Chris Wallace and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the New York Times' "1619 Project." Wallace was having a particularly hard time believing that the so-called Greatest Generation could brutally suppress Black people in part because the 20- and 30-year-olds from Indiana and Brooklyn "fought to defeat ... the worst regime, I would argue in world history."

"You don't think 20-year-olds were in the Klan?" she asked him.

"I don't think many of them were, no," he replied.

In Wallace's story, World War II heroes couldn't also be racists. It felt nonsensical as he was saying it — given the church bombings, assassinations and other examples of racially motivated violence that shaped the civil rights movement — but hey, it was his story and sadly, he was sticking to it.

With 10 dead in Buffalo, I wonder what story Republicans will tell themselves today. I wonder what Fox News personalities will tell viewers now that the "replacement theory" they've been promoting has led to mass killings — again.

The week before the Buffalo massacre, a student at a Christian school in Knoxville was punished for appearing in a social media post wearing a KKK hood and replying with the N-word when asked, "Who do we hate?"

State Rep. Gloria Johnson, a Democrat in the Tennessee House, tweeted, "who taught them this?"