Shooting in Buffalo Leaves 10 Dead, 13 Wounded
Screengrab from WIVB Buffalo Channel 4 News
Still a developing story, but what we know so far points to an utterly depraved act of violence at a Buffalo supermarket.
Ten people were killed and three others suffered non-life-threatening injuries and were transported to local hospitals after a mass shooting at a supermarket on Buffalo’s East Side Saturday afternoon.
The shooter was an 18-year-old white male who was heavily armed with tactical gear and was live-streaming during the mass shooting, officials said. City of Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said the shooter is not from Buffalo and traveled “hours” from outside the area.
“This was pure evil,” Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said. “A straight-up racially motivated hate crime.”
The shooter was identified in court Saturday evening as Payton S. Gendron of Conklin, New York, about 200 miles southeast of Buffalo.
Gendron was arraigned on one count of first-degree murder without bail.
The 18-year-old will be back in court on Thursday at 9:30 a.m. for a felony hearing.
When Gendron exited his vehicle at the supermarket, authorities said, he shot four people in the parking lot. Three of them died and one is in the hospital. The shooter entered the store and opened fire on customers.
Twitch deletes shooter’s live-stream video of Buffalo mass shooting
A retired Buffalo Police officer, Aaron Salter, who was working as a security guard, shot Gendron but he was unharmed because he was wearing armor, Gramaglia said. The retired officer was shot and killed.A law enforcement source told CBS News that the gunman had a racial slur written on his weapon. The attack is being treated as a hate crime.
Erie County District Attorney John Flynn will not confirm the existence of the shooter’s manifesto. He said they believe there was a “racial component” to the attack but won’t say more.
This attack is being investigated by the FBI as a hate crime and as violent extremism.
According to reporting on NBC the shouter existed the store, put the gun under his chin as if to kill himself and then laid down beside him before being tackled by police.Report
I was just commenting the other day about how the people like JD Vance and Tucker Carlson who spew this racist theories but do it in soft civil tones know exactly where the path leads, and always has only one destination which is slaughter.
The people who give them financial backing like Rupert Murdoch and Peter Thiel also know where the path leads.
And of course, their eager viewers and supporters who enthusiastically lap it up, they also know that the path leads inevitably to stacks of corpses.
These people are the co-conspirators of stochastic terrorism.Report
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_To_Prevent_This,%27_Says_Only_Nation_Where_This_Regularly_HappensReport
The murderers screed was full on great replacement theory. I get that professionals love prudence and caution but it seems this often ends up being s destructive vice as well as a virtue. Always hesitant ti comment without absolute certainty as the miscreants and inflamers run wild.Report
It’s because the warfare is now asymmetrical and liberals aren’t willing to engage the fight as it is.Report
Liberals generally operate on optimism and positivity. They don’t want to confront the fact that a more pessimistic viewpoint might be necessary and the Care Bear stare won’t save us.Report
Modern liberalism looks at society and sees “something is wrong” and insists that everything be redone to fix that thing.
The “operate on optimism” part seems an effort to ascribe everything good to one side. It’s like saying “god is love”.
Liberals see racism/injustice/inequality behind every rock and anyone who opposes them on any issue must be evil.Report
The soft underbelly of fascism is that it relies on the great majority being comfortable, and remaining comfortable.
So the fist of oppression is done offstage out of sight, in innocent looking “detention centers” and veiled behind the bland technocratic language of bureaucracy, which allows the supporters of fascism to maintain their veneer of decorum and respectability, and enjoy the admiration and respect of their fellow citizens.
Notice how they yelp when we point out the cruelty and connect it to the innocuous sounding policies and hold them personally accountable for their enabling votes.
Their weakness is that they don’t just want power, they want respectability and popularity too. We can’t always block their path to power, but we can always refuse to give them our respect or admiration.Report
So the next time we have a violent left wing nut shoot someone the police are targeting blacks, or the next time we have a full on riot where people get killed, do we get to hold it’s proponents “personally responsible”? Or is that only a thing when the Right wing peddles inflammatory trash?
This was a hate crime, and it fits the desired narrative so I would imagine we’re going to be hearing about it for a while, but the opponents of the “fist of oppression” doesn’t seem to have a workable agenda other than “vote team Blue”.Report
“someone the police” ==> “someone because the police”Report
Those violent left wing nuts were both arrested AND condemned for their attacked from the left. Ditto the rioters and looters who did turn peaceful protests into something else. BLM, for instance, has long and always denounced violence committed at its protests.
Show me a Republican politician, any Republican politician who will call this guy the racist domestic terrorist he is. I’ll wait. I have good books to read.
Team Blue actually does have cogent responses – things like well funded public schools; job training programs and rural broadband for actual 21st century careers; realistic gun control laws; an increased social safety net. Things that work to address the underlying issues of 18 year olds who get bored surfing the internet and decide to take up racial mass murder. Sadly, those things take time and money and dedicated staff – all things the Right refuses to supportReport
This seems unlikely. Someone is going to fail/lose in life. If that someone is male and connects to previous mass shooters, then he may choose to make himself a name.
We’re going to spend the next month going over this guy’s ideology and probably every aspect of his life. He’s more famous than the Kardashians for a few weeks.
I doubt the ideology actually matters. Take a magic wand and erase “replacement theory”. This guy is still a loser looking for a way to make himself famous. He’ll find something to justify mass murder or just do it without justification.
After we have one of these events, we have people try to connect it to what they want to believe. If we have enough of them, the match up will actually be reasonable. However I don’t see predictive value.
For example the demographics of mass shooters match that of the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_StatesReport
The word you’re ooking for is “Resentment”.
As in, resentment of being denied the superiority they assume they are entitled to.
Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson and JD Vance are prime examples.
To paraphrase the Guthrie song, some will kill you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen.Report
“Resentment” works as description.
So if you’re white, you may reach for white nationalism. If you’re Islamic, then radical Islam. If you’re black, then black liberation theology or whatever it’s called.
Now that’s for people who bother with political justification. For Sandyhook it seems to have been “I want fame”. For Columbine, maybe the same. Going down in a blaze of glory is a thing.Report
Mass shooters, including this one, get to where they are because they have to interact with a whole variety of systems, subcultures and economies in their lives, and all those things combine to bring them to a place where they believe their best option is mass violence. Alter any one of those things, or several of those things, and they make different choices in response to different stimuli.
This shooter’s ideology is particularly pernicious, because as Chip notes his resentment of loosing his “place” in society is being supported and fed at the highest levels of government and the economy.Report
This makes intuitive sense, but it doesn’t seem to match the data.
Within the margin of error, the demographics of mass shooters perfectly matches that of society.
If every community is creating mass shooters at the same rate (although Asians seem to be unrepresented there), then either every community has an identically poisonous ideology or the ideology isn’t having an impact.
Nonsensically violent people adopt nonsensically violent ideologies.Report
Your statistics alluded to below don’t say this though. They say the distribution is in proportion to the population. They also don’t show the ideological drivers for a given shooter. What you should be looking for is the incidents where racial motivations are the primary factor in committing the violence. I don’t know that it has ever been studied, but anecdotal evidence suggests is way more a white male thing then anything else.Report
The data shows percentage of population. The anecdotal info shows the media’s desires. If the narrative is matched it “proves” the larger theory they want to see, if it’s not matched then it’s largely ignored.
You’re not thinking this through.
For every 6 whites we think is motivated by whatever, there’s 1 black who is motivated by… what? White nationalism?
There’s an ideology that is poisonous and causes mass shootings, but it doesn’t change the representation from the percentage of the population? The 2nd part of that statement disagrees with the first.
Cigarette smoking causes cancer, so we expect (by definition) there is more cancer in people who smoke.
If we have a viral, poisonous, mass shooting causing ideology that only whites can have, then there should be more whites committing mass shootings than their percentage of the population. What we see is either there are fewer, or (more likely because of randomness in data) they’re in there at the same percentage of population.Report
Did they, though? I don’t know if Schumer, Biden, et cetera denounced the New York subway shooter as a racist domestic terrorist. I don’t need them to, but I don’t know if they did.Report
The reporting on him is that he wasn’t motivated in his attack by race, but by systemic criminal justice failures.
On the day of, and the day after, both Biden and Schumer issued statements thanking and supporting law enforcement and promising federal resources. The suspect was charged by the feds on domestic terrorism among other things.
But dark and I were in an exchange about the post-George Floyd protests . . . .Report
Dark Matter asked “So the next time we have a violent left wing nut shoot someone the police are targeting blacks”. I mentioned the last left wing nut shooting someone, and you replied essentially that the police were targeting blacks.
And you certainly were implying that Republican politicians should be held to the same standard as the left, so I thought it fair to ask if you were holding individual Democratic politicians to the same standard you said “the left” meets. I mean, it’s easy to find a quote from a group, but if there aren’t quotes from the leading Democratic officeholders, how can you hold leading Republican officeholders to that standard?Report
The place where that premise falls down is that WE DON’T HAVE THAT.
We simply don’t. The last time anything close to this happened from the left was five years ago, the shooting at the Republican baseball practice, and that was, it must be pointed out, rather different than unhinged racism mass murder…it was attempted mass assassination.
Assassination is not the same thing as ‘I will gun down some random demographic group’, and attempted assassination is pretty rare and pretty much the same levels from the left and the right. (With Gifford’s shooting being a bit before that.) I’m not saying assassination is good, but it is not the same thing at all as this low-level attempted genocide of all X people.
And the incident you’re talking about happened _even longer_ ago, and is _literally the largest mass political assassination of cops in history_, with a grand total of…six deaths. (This incident, to remind people, killed 10.)
Killing cops is right up there with assassination (And in fact technically _is_ assassination), in that it is incredibly rare, and the fact the most singular incident of it happened recently doesn’t change that.
—
This thing under discussion, incidentally, is _probably not the only of racist incident on that ON THAT SPECIFIC DAY. There was a shooting in a Vietnamese church too…less is known about that, but it seems pretty clear.
This stuff happens multiple times a year, and that’s restricting it to _mass shootings_. In addition to those, there’s a hell of a lot of violence from people with violent right-wing ideology that isn’t a ‘mass shooting’, just random murders and assaults.
Meanwhile, no one on the left attempts to hunt down and assault and kill demographic groups, because there isn’t some large section of that the left doesn’t stew in a caldron of bubbling racist and sexist and homophobic rage thanks to left-wing media.Report
It was a luncheon at a Taiwanese Presbyterian congregation that shared another church, and the shooter was also reported to be Asian.Report
If it doesn’t match the narrative then there’s nothing to see, move along. We only pay attention to the mass shootings that support our priors.Report
According to The New York Times, almost all of the mass shooting perpetrators they have published stories about are male, most commonly white men.[50]
However, according to most analyses and studies, the proportion of mass shooters in the United States who are white is slightly less than the overall proportion of white people in the general population of the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_States#Mass_shooting_by_shooter's_race
The concept that mass shootings is purely a white male issue says more about the NYT (and the Left in general) than it does the data.Report
White reactionary violence doesn’t equal mass shootings.
The Ahmaud Arbery murder was an example of white reactionary violence, as was the Jan 6 insurrection.Report
So the riots that break out when BLM loses control? Does the Left get ownership of that or are we pretending it’s not related?Report
If the left were whipping up hatred for Walgreens and supporting the idea of looting, sure.
But as we’ve seen, even in the Floyd protests, the violence was often done by apolitical white males.Report
There were a handful of defenses here and there.
(There were also a surprising amount of people who gave the old “it’s only property” defense and explained that, hey, if the bodega gets burned out, more immigrants will move here and open new ones.)Report
remember when that guy shot up the Gilroy Garlic Festival?
no? you don’t? gosh, I wonder why everyone stopped talking about that so fast.Report
Because mass shootings are so common everyone stops talking about most of them pretty fast? It’s sad and disturbing, isn’t it?
Wait, no, you were trying to make a racial point? lol… Fail.Report
Nah bruh, its because the media has an anti-garlic bias . . . .Report
It sounds like it was an anti-Taiwanese Chinese person. That doesn’t conform to the Western understanding of inter-ethnic tension, but it’s close. Investigators are calling it a politically motivated hate crime.Report
Fair enough. I just made the comment because I have seen some people online elsewhere irresponsibly talking about it being another attack by racists whites on Asians – of which there have been more and more these days.Report
Everything I’ve been hearing about has been attacks by blacks on Asians. I mean, I’m sure there have been more white attacks on Asians too, following COVID, but the major news stories have been black-on-Asian.Report
The AP is now reporting that the shooter grew up in Taiwan and is a US citizen. His name is consistent with this: “Chou” is the Taiwanese spelling, while a Chinese person would usually spell it “Zhou” (both are pronounced like “Joe,” more or less).
This story just keeps getting weirder.Report
Let’s keep in mind the real victims. Conservatives who don’t want to defend replacement theory sewage but still want to use it to rile the masses so they will buy t shirts. All the fox/rw media types will be selling this same sh*t by friday if they can.Report
yes yes, children, let it out. we understand that you’re very upset and you need to talk out your feelings. you don’t really know how to process them, so you need to purge them.
please flush when you’re done, don’t leave a mess.Report
Republicans, nervously: “White Replacement Theory? What is that?”
Elise Stefanik: “Here, let me explain!”
https://mobile.twitter.com/EliseStefanik/status/1526169590841106432
I’m just amazed she used more than 14 words to spell it out.Report
Thst’s a hell of a swindle you’re pulling.
The Great Replacement is an antisemitic conspiracy theory. The idea is that Jews are conspiring to increase immigration of high-fertility minorities, and possibly suppress gentile white fertility, in order to accelerate the transformation of the US into a minority white country.
Note that the thing that makes this really bad is the antisemitic aspect. Stefanik didn’t say anything about Jews. No, it’s not a dog whistle. The thing she’s saying makes sense when taken at face value. That doesn’t mean it’s true, but you don’t need to assume a Jewish conspiracy to make sense of this.
And in fact, it kind of is true. I’ve been seeing Democrats gleefully predict a permanent Democratic majority aided by demographic tailwinds for twenty years. I’ve also been seeing them support policies that would hurry this process along. Creating a streamlined roadmap to citizenship for illegal immigrants was literally in their 2020 platform. Open borders is more controversial, but it’s something that’s seriously proposed in Democratic (and libertarian) policy circles.
It is not a coincidence that Democrats are supporting policies that would create an electoral advantage for them. This is absolutely a motivating factor. Even if it’s also good policy, it’s a lot easier to convince yourself that a policy is good when it will also help your team win elections, and “it’s good policy” has not traditionally been a sufficient criterion for inclusion in either major party’s platform.
Without the antisemitism, this is literally just a mildly cynical restatement of actual policies being proposed by Democratic politicians and pundits.
I don’t know much about Stefanik. I probably wouldn’t endorse her if I did. I can’t say for certain that your assessment of her isn’t substantively correct. All I know is that you’re pulling a particularly sleazy rhetorical sleight of hand here.Report
Everything you need to know about the Great Replacement Theory can be learned by watching Tucker Carlson.
Hint: It’s about brown people.Report
Yes, Democrats welcome people who come here, contribute to our economy, educate their kids here, and strongly desire to be Americans. We embrace the melting pot. And we recognize that the undocumented migrants already here are a part of that economy, they aren’t well protected, and they aren’t taxed. So we want to establish policies that embrace them and their contributions to our society. You are fully correct about that.
Here’s the thing though – Tucker Carlson, Elise Stefaniak, and others are actively using the anti-Semitic language originally ginned up in the Great Replacement conspiracy to refer to those policies and those people. Conservative politicians and pundits are actively coopting that language and that belief and expanding it to rile their aggrieved base even though those same politicians and pundits know that demographically they can’t turn the tide without open war that kills millions. The Buffalo shooter bought into that rhetoric, and decided to do his part by spending months planning to go to black neighborhoods and shoot up black people.
Its not a swindle on Chip’s part.Report
When the next outburst of reactionary violence occurs, remember this:
2022 ELECTION
GOP candidates unleash wave of ads targeting transgender rights
Like never before, Republicans in primaries across the country have made attacking transgender rights central to their paid media campaigns and stump speeches — focusing on issues of education, gender transitioning and sports, according to the ad tracking firm AdImpact.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/gop-candidates-unleash-wave-ads-targeting-transgender-rights-rcna28945
“Oh will no one rid me of these grooming pedophiles?”Report
I really hope this is a dud. That few enough people care that it proves not worth the time.Report
The hatred isn’t limited to actual trans people, it is towards anyone who supports them, anyone who insists on treating them as full and equal citizens.
When they say “Groomers”, it’s people us here on this blog who are the enemy and are deserving of violence.
The purpose of Great Replacement Theory or the “Groomers” charge isn’t to persuade, but to give permission and identify a target to disturbed people who are already looking for an object.Report
Hardly. It’s to manufacture an enemy/out-group. For the media the motivation is clicks, for politicians that’s votes.
This sort of behavior can been seen all over the place. Years ago I saw Polish priests (in the outback of Poland) trying to do so against American-style Halloween.
Team Red and Team Blue politicians do this to each other. Dragging in groups that don’t want to play should be a no-no.
Manufactured outrage and proclaiming that [your group] is under threat from [other group] is effective.Report
Although not new, let’s not lose sight of the continuing pattern of reactionary violence:
Plot to Blow Up Democratic Headquarters Exposed California Extremists Hiding in Plain Sight
Text messages contained in court records show the two men agreed to burn down the headquarters of the California Democratic Party in Sacramento, a building diagonal to the California Highway Patrol office tasked with protecting state lawmakers and daily visitors to the Capitol. Also nearby: a youth center, gym and popular bookstore
https://www.kqed.org/news/11913965/plot-to-blow-up-democratic-headquarters-exposed-california-extremists-hiding-in-plain-sightReport
Would you say that reactionary violence is…OUTTA CONTROL?
IIRC a few months ago you were saying that concern over several thousand excess homicides in 2020, and more in 2021, presumably committed by thousands of individuals, was just a moral panic.Report
One of his buddies turned him in. That’s the pattern in the US. We have more lone wolves than other countries but less cooperative efforts. Probably another sign that ideology matters less than you’d think. Some people treat this as a religion where despite proclaiming this is what they really believe, if someone in their click gets serious they are get turned in.Report
NPR has a pretty good summary of how White Replacement Theory got mainstreamed in the US:
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/17/1099223012/how-the-replacement-theory-went-mainstream-on-the-political-rightReport
Huh. They had a section that talked about how demographics are changing and how there will be fewer than 50% white people in the country soon due to stuff like migration.
This seems to be a “X isn’t happening, Y is happening! Y is good, actually” situation.Report
It’s more about how white people are coping with the demographic change.
A lot of them seem to be brittle, anxious. One might even term it White Fragility.Report
Yeah, you’d think that they’d be on board with it.
Well, time to alternate between “this isn’t happening, you’re crazy” and “you’re racist for noticing”.Report
We’re only disagreeing on what “it” is.Report
“‘It’ is a bailey!”
“‘It’ is motte!”
“No! ‘It’ is a bailey!”
“No! ‘It’ is motte!”Report
Conservative commenters like Tucker Carlson say the demographic shifts are a pernicious plot by Democrats to destroy conservative white culture – which he recently termed Legacy Americans – (whatever the hell that is), as opposed to the simple outcome of economic and immigration policies that actually favor importing labor instead of growing it here. People like the Buffalo shooter conclude that if Democrats are actively plotting to “destroy” white people by letting in more brown people, then brown people must be killed in sufficient numbers to at least maintain control for the white people.
Carlson could just as easily point out that those folks are serving a significant economic function, and that they are actually often aligned with conservative whites on social issues – which would make them a potent political ally of those same conservatives . . . but he earns more money scapegoating them.Report
Oh, I agree. I’ve begun to suspect that we’re about 15 minutes away from Hispanics becoming “white”.
You know Ruy Teixeira? He’s one of the co-authors of The Emerging Democratic Majority.
He’s started noticing that the Democrats have started bleeding Hispanic support (heck, he’s noticed that this has started happening with working class voters of *ALL* races).
If the Republicans could get their heads out of their asses, they might be able to do something.
Well, maybe “schools” is a good vector for them to attack on. We’ll see, I guess. I mean, those are the people having kids, right?Report
I live surrounded by people named Garcia, Cuevas and other sorts of Hispanic names who are 4-8 generations on the coast and identify as white. And vote exclusively Republican.Report
I’m sure you can get lots of anecdotal stories here about long-time established Hispanic families. My niece (ancestry Anglo-Saxon on one side, German on the other) married into one in Omaha several years ago. Her new father-in-law inherited the already-sizeable local business started by his Grandfather Martinez and grew it. Her new mother-in-law thought her son was marrying down. The family’s politics seem to be pretty clearly based on economic and business interests, not ethnicity.Report
Do that and my kid is no longer a minority in her school.
What I’d like to see is a break down by something other than skin color, i.e. by culture.
I expect we’d find out that poor whites from single parent households have something close to the same life that the other races do. We’d find out that success seriously follows behavior and culture around and skin color is just an indicator of culture.
That might change the conversation to something useful.Report
I think the demographics of the shooters suggest it’s the other way around. People like the Buffalo shooter decide they’re going to kill people and then they look for an ideology that will enable that.
If the ideology could inspire people to kill then we’d see very different demographics.
This suggests even if we magically get rid of that ideology, something else will instantly be used in it’s place. For example I’d guess that the number of non-whites using that ideology is effectively zero.Report
On topic, and timely:
Three survivors of Tulsa Race Massacre receive $1 million donation
The last known living survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre received a $1 million donation Wednesday from a philanthropic organization — a substantial sum for the three centenarians more than 100 years after White mobs destroyed their community.
Viola Fletcher, 108, Lessie Benningfield Randle, 107, and Hughes “Uncle Red” Van Ellis, 102, accepted the donation Wednesday afternoon at the Greenwood Cultural Center in Tulsa. It was presented by Ed Mitzen, co-founder of the New York-based nonprofit Business for Good.
Fletcher was 7 years old when White mobs attacked the Black neighborhood of Greenwood, a thriving business district known as “Black Wall Street.” The massacre killed as many as 300 and displaced more than 10,000 Black people. In the days after the massacre ended on June 1, 1921, hundreds of massacre survivors were rounded up at gunpoint and marched to “internment camps,” according to survivors’ testimony. No White person was ever arrested or charged.
I was in my forties when I heard about the Tulsa Massacre, and only because I am deeply involved in politics.
None of my history books mentioned it, it wasn’t referenced in books or plays or movies that a casual viewer might see.
Because in the immediate aftermath, many good white people, people who would never think of themselves as racist nevertheless made a determined effort to forget, to ignore and turn their eyes away.
Statues to long dead Confederate generals? Oh hell yeah, they were erecting those up until the 1960s. Minor skirmishes of the American Revolution like the Boston Massacre (5 guys died, fewer than this latest shooting!) were regularly told and retold in grade schools everywhere.
Yet this massacre and subsequent imprisonment of the survivors was forgotten, due to the fragile state of white people/Report