As mass shootings continue to plague the nation, one GOP candidate believes that the spark in gun violence is because of Black people.

Blake Masters addressed the issue and said that it’s “Black people, frankly.”

“We do have a gun violence problem in this country, and it’s gang violence,” said Masters during an appearance on the Jeff Oravits Show podcast. “It’s people in Chicago, St. Louis shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly.”

The Arizona Senate hopeful also blamed the Democrats.

“And the Democrats don’t want to do anything about that,” he continued.

Masters, who often uses race in his arguments, has previously talked about wanting to get away from the subject of a person’s skin color. During Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, he told Oravits that “most Americans just, you know, just want to stop obsessing about race all the time.”

During his argument, Masters took a moment to blame “the left.”

“The left’s biggest tool in their toolkit is just to divide people on the basis of race, and that’s really messed up,” Masters continued.

Dubbed an “immigration patriot” by white nationalist website VDARE, Masters has also pushed the “great replacement” conspiracy theory which blames the “elite” and Jews for replacing white people in their so-called “home” countries.

Gunmen in several mass shootings across the U.S. have claimed allegiance to the “great replacement” theory. Attacks where this philosophy has been adopted include the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia attack, the El Paso Walmart shooting in 2019 that targeted Mexicans, and more recently the shooting in Buffalo where a gunman murdered 10 Black people inside of a grocery store on a Saturday night (May 14).

His comments come on the heels of not only the Buffalo shooting, but the recent elementary school shooting that took the lives of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas on May 24.