They just went to do their weekly shopping, but for ten residents of the American city of Buffalo, that ended with their death from rifle bullets. They were mowed down by an 18-year-old American who had become convinced that people of color, like almost all of his victims, will in the future supplant white people like him.
Three other visitors to the Tops Friendly Market were injured by bullets from a military-style assault rifle. Among the dead was a guard, a former police officer who tried to take out the gunman. He fired at him, but only hit the bulletproof vest the man was wearing, and then he was hit himself.
Finally, the shooter went out. He appeared to be planning to kill himself, but surrounded by police officers who had arrived, he finally fell to his knees, took off his vest and surrendered. The shooter, Payton Gendron, is not from Buffalo, New York. He lives in Conklin, on the other side of that state, about 200 miles away.
From Great Replacement
It is not known why he chose this supermarket in a black neighborhood of Buffalo. It is clear that he wanted to shoot black people. A manifesto was found on the internet that appears to have been written by him. In that 180-page document, he mentions, among other things, the Great Replacement: the theory that a small group of rulers, often identified as Jews, are replacing the white population and culture around the world with colored people. . This theory is also known by the term ‘population’.
Gendron calls himself a fascist and an anti-Semite, writing that he was radicalized during the corona pandemic. He is said to have been inspired by previous similarly motivated massacres, such as those at a Bible study in Charleston in 2015, which killed nine people, and the one in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, which left 51 people dead.
During his act, Gendron carried a camera, the images of which were shown live on the video platform Twitch. But according to Twitch, that stream was stopped after two minutes.
Popular TV channels
In recent months, politicians and academics have expressed their concern that the US population theory is no longer being preached only in the corners of the internet, by figures that hardly anyone takes seriously, but also on widely watched TV channels, and that politicians benefit from it. to succumb to that idea.
On the much-watched right-wing TV channel Fox News, for example, the top-rated host, Tucker Carlson, accused Democrats of wanting to let millions of asylum seekers in and give them the right to vote so that the Democrats will be unbeatable in elections.
Several Republican politicians are making similar noises. Among them Donald Trump, but also Elise Stefanik, member of the faction leadership in the House of Representatives. She ran ads on Facebook last year accusing Democrats of an “election uprising,” which featured rows of immigrants reflected in President Joe Biden’s sunglasses.
Restrict gun ownership
As well as putting pressure on Republican politicians to distance themselves from the population rhetoric, the Buffalo killings also sparked the usual calls to limit the availability of weapons in the US. New York Governor Kathy Hochul, herself a resident of Buffalo, pointed out that the Gendron could legally purchase his assault rifle in the state because a nationwide ban on such weapons expired in 2004.
The shooter had an extra large magazine for it, which helped him kill so many people in a short time. Such warehouses are prohibited in New York. But the shooter only had to drive a few miles from his hometown of Conklin to buy one in Pennsylvania.
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