Andrew Sullivan criticized speculation in the media about Long's motives and the assertion that his actions constitute a hate crime, saying that the media is "rushing to promote ready-made narratives, which actually point away from the empirical facts." Elizabeth Nolan Brown, writing in Reason, said that Long's motives were "still unclear, despite many in the media attributing it to anti-Asian racism". Deborah Epstein, director of Georgetown University Law Center’s Domestic Violence Clinic, claimed in an interview for NPR: "This man targeted his victims because they were Asian, and he targeted his victims because they were women. And we have to shed the blinders that limit us to seeing the race piece, but not the gender piece of hate."
