One Among Many American Mass Shootings

Neighbourhood residents gather at the scene of a mass shooting at the Tops Market in Buffalo, N.Y. May 14, 2022   Derek Gee, Buffalo News

"With respect to the tragic events of this past Saturday, it is being investigated, as the FBI articulated, as a hate crime.” 

"The term domestic terrorism is a legal term, and because the investigation is ongoing, I won't — I won't employ that term."

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas

 

"There is a lot of threats out there that I'm hearing about, and that we're hearing about in law enforcement."

"So let this case send a message out there to any tough guy or anyone who wants to be cute out there in sending messages or threatening anyone or putting anything on social media. I will find you, and I will arrest you, and I will prosecute you."

"The mental health forensic part of this has now become a moot point and is now off the table."

Erie County District Attorney John Flynn

 

"Information has also come as a result of some of this investigation that the individual was here a few months ago, back in early March. So as I said, there's a lot of material to go through, so that we have confirmed now it appears that individual was here back in early March,"

"This is a very long investigation. There's a lot of digital footprint, electronics we'll have to go through. So that process is ongoing."

"There was evidence that was uncovered that he had plans, had he gotten out of here, to continue his rampage and continue shooting people. He’d even spoken about possibly going to another store."

Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia 

Victims of the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, on May 14, 2022   CTV News

Among a third of a billion people populating a country there will always be psychopaths, people suffering from mental illness, psychotic events, horrors of one kind or another that befall a society. Disaffected individuals, people struggling to cope with their inner demons, those in society who believe in the superior exceptionalism of white over colour neglecting to think that our brains work similarly, that our emotions are evoked in the very same manner regardless of colour. Fundamentally, we are one.

Spurred by anger, vengeance over real or perceived personal grievances, ideologies, religious convictions and above all, the influence that social peers can have on a mass audience of vulnerable-to-fundamental-extremism social media users manipulated to believe in a certain way, encouraged to behave in a manner reflecting the rage felt by subscribers to race theories, ideological conspiracies, religious interpretations. And then, of course, there us the mentally ill, a category all to its own populated by a significant percentage of the population, to various degrees of social dysfunction.

Perhaps it is because youth are more suggestible, at a time when their still-maturing brains and their social and sexual maturation is in progress. Psychological insecurity, readiness to adapt to belief in bogus racial divides and entitlements, all play a part in the evolution of a mind toward malice, hate and the will to do harm to others self-identified as different, inferior, threatening and disposable, as though killing someone as a symbol of what is wrong with society is a moral imperative.

The divide between normalcy and extremism in belief and action is so profound that most people have trouble getting their minds around the reality that there are those in society driven by all-consuming hate for which violent action is the only method of bringing relief. Or, in the case of those who aspire to be admired for the level of their commitment to hateful causes, seeking approval and the status of hero among their peers for having committed themselves to the kind of action that results in mass murder.

The white teen who shot ten strangers to death in Buffalo on Saturday, is a teen whom former classmates at the Buffalo area high school they all attended cannot 'recognize' in the character of the gunman who destroyed thirteen lives; ten to death, another three badly wounded as he went on a killing spree. Reportedly, he comes from a non-racist family, former friends and school mates describe him as calm, reasonably studious and intelligent.

Yet, dressed for the occasion in military-style garments, carrying a deadly-altered weapon, he embarked on a pre-planned slaughter targeting a majority-black neighbourhood and a supermarket that employs blacks and serves the surrounding black population. What the 18-year-old Payton Gendron set out to do was to murder as many people as he could to validate his white-supremacist beliefs.

He had written a lengthy, hateful racist screed that set down his beliefs that impelled him to his actions that have so horrified his community, his state, his nation, and the world at large. He surrendered himself the day of his murderous assault. His hate manifesto was posted on the Internet. He wore a live camera as he conducted his social-cleansing exercise in the murder of ten innocent people live-streaming the atrocity on theTwitch social media site..

"The evidence that we have uncovered so far makes no mistake this is an absolute racist hate crime that will be prosecuted as a hate crime", Joseph Gramaglia, Buffalo Police Commissioner said on Sunday, addressing reporters. Eleven of those hit by gunfire were black, two white. The attacker had, a year previously, been taken into custody and undergone a hospital mental evaluation. He was not held following that evaluation, but released. 

He had made threats on that earlier occasion, bringing the attention of police to his potential for future trouble. Now, it appears, he fulfilled the original concerns that he might become a violent threat. He appears not earlier and not at the present time to be afflicted with mental health problems, but a garden variety-racist attracted to the stereotyping of blacks as inferior and somehow dangerous to society. 

He had legally acquired a rifle, then modified it illegally with a high-capacity magazine. Several other weapons were discovered by police in the car he drove to Buffalo from an adjacent town where he lived. Arraigned after the shooting on first-degree murder charges in state court, he will face a maximum penalty of life behind bars with no chance for parole. The perpetrator of this vicious act of community violence pleaded not guilty to the charges brought against him.

A crowd gathered Sunday outside Tops Market for a vigil the day after the shooting in Buffalo.  Credit...Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times