The 88-year-old white supremacist from Maryland responsible for today’s shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial earlier today, James von Brunn, is a known white supremacist according to authorities.

A spokesman for the US Park Police, Sergeant David Schlosser, said von Brunn walked into the US Holocaust Memorial Museum armed with a shotgun and opened fire on a security guard before being shot and seriously wounded by two other guards.

The security guard and the gunman were both transported to George Washington University Hospital with serious injuries.

White supremacist groups exist throughout the world and were dominant in the United States before the American Civil War and for decades after Reconstruction.

The same is true of Apartheid-era South Africa and of parts of Europe at various time periods – most notably under Nazi Germany’s Third Reich.

One of the better known white supremacist groups in the US is the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), whose avowed purpose is to protect the rights and further the interests of white Americans by violence and intimidation.

In the UK the white supremacist ideology has become associated with a racist faction of the skinhead subculture, while in Germany Nazi revivalist movements still attract some support.

The basic ideology of all white supremacist groups is similar to many Christian Identity groups, in the conviction that there is a Jewish conspiracy in control of the United States government, international banking, and the media.