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The Atlanta Shooting - First order or second order racism?

 Here's one of the things that bothers me about the coverage of the Atlanta Shooting: it's being portrayed as a direct result of racism against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI), but I'm bothered by that interpretation.  I don't have a determined position on this, but I'd like to hear any other perspectives that might clarify the situation.  The shooter targeted massage parlors, as part of his own crusade against sex work.  The fact that six of the eight people killed were Asian American women isn't a statistical fluke.  Massage parlors are frequently fronts for sex work, and the women employed in them are frequently trafficked from Asia to work there.  Given the shooter's stated motivation, it seems he was going after sex workers, rather than AAPI people.  The fact that these women were Asian didn't have anything to do with why they died, as a first order cause.  If the women working there had been African-American, or White, or Latinx, or any other ethnicity, they would have been just as dead.  However, the reason they were there and perceived as sex workers (which we don't even know for certain) was because they were AAPI.  This is one of those situations that's a lot more complex than most of the reporting wants to address.

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