I'm not going to like the individual posts on the Buffalo mass shooting, just say thanks to @SuperMatt and especially @JayMysteri0 for all their contributions on the topic, from the initial report to some really thought provoking follow up.
I can't add much, it's a goddam tragedy of guns + racism. People were killed, people, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, because this ignorant, hate filled motherf****er acted on some idiotic right wing nonsense that ultimately was about the colors of a person's skin __and__ had the ability to act because he was able to buy assault weapons and tactical gear. And if someone corrects my use of the term "assault weapon", here's a nice big FUCK YOU in advance.
I only hope this cowardly dirtbag gets judged by a jury of Black Americans, and he gets what's coming to him in prison.
The asshole travelled 200 miles to kill people who NEVER bothered him, who were trying to get on with their lives.
Something to remember when reading up on this latest racist shooter. Michael Brown killed in Ferguson by a cop, is a Black ( yes, it actually even says that in wikipedia ) man. This killer of ten people is a White teenager. Handy when you go to court, dress you up in a suit, and have you slobber on the stand pretending you cared you shot people in a different town you travelled to. Sound koffrittenhousekoff familiar? https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1525851085461766144/ https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1525859585868931072/
At least one person is dead and five wounded -- including four who are critically injured -- after a shooting Sunday at a church in Laguna Woods, California, the sheriff's department said.
Arizona state Senator Wendy Rogers, who is endorsed by former President Trump for reelection, said Saturday that the shooting is the start of "fed boy summer."
So the desperation today on social media over the Buffalo shooter since the false flag thing isn't catching on, ...is to blame Rachel Maddow?
Stay with me here. Since the shooter in his own manifesto parroted Tucker Carlson, people have made the association of the shooter being inspired by Carlson. So the new reach / deflection is the shooter that shot at Steve Scalise said how much he loves Rachel Maddow, ...THUS it must be Rachel Maddow's fault it happened. If you are NOT willing to say that, then Carlson had nothing to do with the shooter that paraphrased him, and... whatever else SOME people need to distance themselves from the shooter.
You can just search her and it opens this rabbit hole of denial, and posts about her pointing out how stalking has been a regular thing with the nuttier GOP fans.
The distancing from the Buffalo shooter seems to have really caught some who got very casual with shit like the GRT, by surprise.
What I want to know is why a fear of immigrants replacing White voters, leads to shooting Black people who've had a history of suffering voter suppression? THAT literally makes ZERO F' ing sense. https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1526205871646248961/
They're good at that game. And the crazy part is that they get a whole bunch of people to believe them. They had people blaming AOC for our power grid problems in Texas. They had people cheering Ted Cruz fleeing to Cancun during the freeze and talking shit about AOC flying to Texas to volunteer and help during the freeze. I'm dead serious. Conservatives in this state who were freezing for several days were like "Ted deserves a vacation" LMAO
He feeds on white rage — it got him elected president. At this point, the horror in Buffalo isn't even surprising
www.salon.com
He will be described as a "lone wolf" who "acted alone." In important respects, this is misleading. Whether or not Gendron had personal contact with other right-wing fanatics, he is part of a global white supremacist project that includes the Trump movement and the Republican Party.
His actions will be attributed to "mental illness." In fact, in Gendron's manifesto he makes clear that he knows what he is doing and why. He clearly articulates the motivations, reasoning and planning involved in his act of anti-Black terrorism. Of course, the vast majority of people with mental illnesses are not violent.
The Buffalo attack is "shocking." This is an absurd reaction. The Buffalo attack was wholly predictable and is the obvious result of an American neofascist ideology that has taken control of the Republican Party and much of the right-wing media and "conservative" movement.
"A good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun." This is an appeal to the disproved claim that more guns equals less crime. There was an armed security guard at the supermarket in Buffalo. He shot Gendron several times without seriously injuring him. Gendron's body armor stopped the bullets. The brave guard, whose name was Aaron Salter Jr., was then shot and killed by Gendron.
It is too soon to talk about what happened. We must wait for the facts. The facts about what happened in Buffalo on Saturday are self-evident. A white man drove hundreds of miles to kill Black people because he believed they and other nonwhites, as directed by an imaginary global Jewish cabal, were "taking away" what he believed what "his country."
We must not politicize mass shootings. This is a tragedy: We send thoughts and prayers. Gun violence is a public safety issue. White supremacy is a public safety issue, as well as a national security issue. The same is true of domestic terrorism. It is the responsibility of a government to keep its citizens safe. These are inherently political matters.
The mainstream news media has already begun pivoting to a narrative of "healing" and "hope" in the aftermath of the Buffalo attack. That too is part of a long history in which the suffering and pain of Black and brown people is minimized so as not to injure the sensibilities and feelings of white society. Moreover, minimizing that suffering also serves to negate Black and brown people's demands for justice and equal treatment.
First, I’m not someone who think all guns should be banned, but as a somewhat involuntary gun owner I wouldn’t be hysterical if society decided we want to get rid of guns. Most significantly I think a ban is impractical and it’s hardly worth advocating because of the 33% of Americans that own guns and among those who do not, slightly more than half could see themselves as owning a gun in the future.
That said, I am all for making a universal and comprehensive process for approving people who seek gun ownership. Like having psych evaluations and ways to seize weapons from those deemed to be unstable (“red flag laws”) in all states. How about limiting ammunition sales? Considering how many mass shootings and crimes are committed by young people, I think raising the minimum age to 21 or 24 is entirely reasonable.
As for AR-15 and similar guns, there is a lot of debate about banning these. The pro-gun activists come up with technical reasons as to why it is impossible to define an assault rifle. Point taken but as someone who has fired a multitude of guns, I don’t think anyone needs a rifle that shoots that big of rounds (5.56x45), that quickly, that accurately, that easily, with a magazine that holds 30+ rounds for “self defense”. I would not be opposed to a semi-automatic rifle ban.
Secondly, how the hell did this psycho A. Not receive some sort of regular some sort of regular counseling after at his high school stating his goal after graduation was to “commit a murder-suicide” less than a year ago, which he claimed was a joke? What sort of investigation did the police do? Had they looked at his digital footprint would they have found what they’re finding now? What steps did the hospital take to actually evaluate him and what was their conclusion?
I don’t know how many of these shootings have to happen where after the fact it turns out a lot of people knew the shooter was disturbed and said/did nothing. Literally every case of a mass murder perpetrated by a teen/young adult has unacceptable failures of policy and oversight. When the red flags are raised to authorities, they fail to follow through. Good of the school to immediately call the police in this instance, but it’s too bad the system failed everyone.
As someone who works at one of the worlds top psych hospitals and owns a mental health program, I am all too familiar how many run of the mill psych wards work. There is no time for serious evaluation. The insurance company doesn’t want to pay to begin with- let alone any longer than necessary, and the patient is discharged. They might recommend an outside therapist but there’s not follow up. Besides, the patient is probably put on a 7 month waiting list for said therapist, especially if state insurance is involved.
I suspect he was brought to the hospital, spent 6 minutes with him where they asked him if he wanted to kill people and himself, he said no, and the hospital determined there was no specific threat. The reality is in most cases a psychpath isn’t going to be diagnosed in a 24hr emergency stay. My hospital has a a specialized psych diagnostic program that’s usually a minimum of 2 weeks, usually 4. Patients are basically individually observed during all waking hours and every test is thrown at them, from psych tests to blood work to sleep studies to MRIs and even genetic testing. But 2 weeks of this program costs $50k+ out of pocket only.
As understand, NY’s red flag laws should have prevented him from purchasing a gun. Why was he not flagged? Who had the authority to flag him? If his case doesn’t meet the criteria, I don’t know what does. If someone is dragged involuntary to the hospital because they said they wanted to commit murder/suicide, maybe let’s not allow them to purchase a gun?
I have long advocated that is a broken system. Most psych hospitals suck and try to move people out the door as quickly as possible. Quite frankly, if someone makes a threat against a school or any type of mass shooting, these need to be handled much more rigorously- why not make it a crime, or some sort of situation where you’re not charged but mandated to regular therapy for a year? Or they get tagged as a potential risk and have to go through a year or therapy + a more extensive background/social evaluation if they ever want to buy a gun again.
The irony is most gun owners support more regulations. If society fails to enact and enforce sensible guardrails, we end up with with our current state. Maybe eventually the “not another inch crowd” will realize the more they obstruct sensible reforms, the more likely more people are going to oppose guns altogether as tragedies like this continue.
I believe there is room to compromise when it comes to stricter regulation. I don’t care if we have to grandfather in the existing owners to existing laws for them to agree so maybe we can have a safer future.
This terrorist was planning the mass murder for a long time. He had taken multiple trips to that Tops to make sure there were plenty of black people there and to do some recon.
A review of more than 600 pages of messages by The Washington Post found that Gendron resolved in December to kill those he slurred as “replacers,” and decided in February to target Buffalo’s Tops grocery store based on its local African American population. In March, he performed a reconnaissance-style trip to monitor the store’s security and map out its aisles, the messages show. When a store guard confronted him about why he had repeatedly entered that day, Gendron made excuses and fled in what he described as “a close call,” the messages state.
Having identified the supermarket as “attack area 1,” Gendron detailed two additional Buffalo locations as areas at which to “shoot all blacks,” according to the messages, which showed that he had charted routes to each location, worked out the times needed for each shootout and assessed that more than three dozen people in all could be fatally shot.
Having considered attacking in other cities including Rochester, Gendron wrote online on Feb. 17 that he had a “new plan”: Buffalo, which had a higher proportion of Black residents. “TOPS Friendly Markets,” he wrote, “damn that is looking good.”
The messages detailed a March 8 trip to the supermarket in which Gendron allegedly surveilled the movements of the store’s security guards and made observations of the weapons they carried. Detailed sketches of the store’s floor plan were included in the messages, together with multiple photographs, including a parking spot “for the attack.”
The written account said its author was stopped and ticketed for driving at 64 mph in a 40 mph section of State Highway 36 en route to Buffalo on March 8. The Post obtained a copy of a speeding ticket issued to Gendron by a New York state trooper that day that matches those details.
His actions will be attributed to "mental illness." In fact, in Gendron's manifesto he makes clear that he knows what he is doing and why. He clearly articulates the motivations, reasoning and planning involved in his act of anti-Black terrorism. Of course, the vast majority of people with mental illnesses are not violent.
Just a point of clarification- Just because he wasn’t psychotic (disconnected from reality) or disassociated (disconnected from self) doesn’t mean he wasn’t mentally ill. In cases of severe psychosis / disassociation, people don’t usually have the coherence to arrange and execute a plan, such as a mass murder. To be clear though, one can be mentally ill and still be 100% responsible for his/her crimes.
It’s very possible he has a personality disorder, such as antisocial personality disorder which is primarily characterized by a lack of empathy (psychopathy) and often little-to-no conscience. Personality disorders often include traits from other PD’s- such as narcissism, borderline traits (inability to regulate emotions, unstable identity, pathological fear of abandonment, drastic idolization of people they like and drastic devaluation those they don’t), etc. Personality disorders can be very dangerous to the individual and others if the condition is not well managed, often a difficult process. That’s not to say all people with PD’s are dangerous though.
It is also possible he is completely sane and just has extremely radical ideas. Studies suggest many young people who leave their comfortable lifestyle to become Islamic extremists are perfectly sane, but are radicalized to do insane things. I’m not quite so sure these individuals are entirely mentally healthy- I could potentially see depression and identity conflicts as catalysts for seeking a sense of belonging and purpose with such groups filling those voids. But such mental illness case is a very different circumstance from psychotic disorders and personality disorders.
Given we know very little about the perpetrator, we can only speculate what conditions he may or may not have. You can’t diagnose someone you’ve never met, which also includes ruling he is not mentally ill. Those evaluating him will have to make that determination.
We can speculate though and I suspect you’re more than likely correct that the shooter was competent and well aware of his actions and motivations when he committed this atrocity. I’ll have to look at his manifesto as I have not, but it would not be surprising to me if there were underlying issues. There’s a plenty of radical fat-right wingers with contemptible ideologies in the country, but they’re usually not mass murdering strangers.
This terrorist was planning the mass murder for a long time. He had taken multiple trips to that Tops to make sure there were plenty of black people there and to do some recon.
According to the local Buffalo news, the shooter reportedly plagiarized parts of his manifesto from the Christ Church perpetrator. It’s pretty bad when someone has to use other peoples words to articulate their motivation for committing heinous crimes.
BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) – The 180-page screed being attributed to a white supremacist charged in Saturday’s shooting rampage that targeted African-Americans at a Buffalo grocery reads like an operatio…
A little snippet in a book review, that I thought was pertinent to this discussion:
For instance, “A History of Violence,” written after the Las Vegas gun massacre of 2017, explains how what is now America’s most widely owned rifle, the AR-15, arose from the military’s quest for a lightweight weapon that could do maximum damage through high-volume “area fire,” rather than relying on carefully aimed sniper shots. He also recounts the grisly sequence of experiments in “wound ballistics” that guided the choice of ammunition for the AR-15 and its military descendant, the M16. (According to his family, the AR-15’s designer, Eugene Stoner, never imagined this weapon in civilian hands.) With a slightly modified AR-15, the Las Vegas gunman was able to kill 58 people and wound at least 400 more. “There was nothing particularly remarkable about the shooter’s skills,” Klay writes. “His lethality was primarily a function of the sheer number of rounds he could put downrange.”
The killer in Tops wasn’t mentally ill. He is just a racist butthole.
Rose Wysocki, 56, who works as a produce manager at Tops Friendly Market, told The Post that 18-year-old Payton Gendron made the alarming remark when he asked her for an item while she was working last month.
“I showed him where it was and he was acting stupid … I took him to the item and gave it to him. As I did, he remarked, ‘You look like you don’t belong here,'” Wysocki said of the encounter, which took place around Easter.
“I said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ He said, ‘You look like you just belong in a suburb store, not here.’ I said, ‘Well, I was in a suburb store and I got promoted here and I love it here. I love my customers, co-workers, the store. It’s a great place to work.’”
“As he turned and walked away, he said, ‘Another n—r lover,'” she added.
Wysocki claims she saw Gendron at the store several times after he made the initial remarks — but she avoided him every time.
Real nice guy. Knew exactly what he was doing. Easy access to the weapons of war made it possible for him to carry out his sick fantasies. So enough of the “mental health” argument from the gun lovers. The real problem is military weapons easily accessible to anybody.
The GOP is so neck-deep in this pro-Trump, anti-reality, anti-black, anti-Jew, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-democracy cult that I’m really at a loss. If you could go back in time to 2004, 2006 or so and tell me I’d be missing the diet-racism, bigotry and dog whistling of the GOP, I’d have laughed, but here we are where pre-Obama GOP racism seems less awful.
How can people look at simple facts and pretend white supremacy isn’t a problem, racism isn’t a problem, etc? Fox News touts replacement theory and mass election fraud, but claims total innocence when someone shoots a bunch of black and brown people in a church, a Walmart, a grocery store… in fact, Tucker is already crying like a victim himself, claiming the left just wants to use this incident to limit free speech, I really don’t know how that guy lives with himself, money must really make it easier to do bad things. These people have more sympathy for Kyle Rittenhouse and George Zimmerman than any and all of the victims of this unthinkable crime.
Listening to Tucker Carlson twist and dilute this to “because a teen killed ten strangers you shouldn’t be allowed to state your political beliefs out loud” and Ingraham spin this as just fuel for the left‘s agenda, along with a “protest that goes wrong” (her take on January 6) makes you start losing hope for humanity.
Some forms of cancer present 0 symptoms until at last they decide to kill you outright. Police violence was nearly non-existent until the rapid rise of cell phone cameras suddenly caused it to exist. Racism was almost certainly as bad as it is now, just not as overt/visible.
The shooter apparently wrote in his diary that in response to a feral cat fighting with his pet cat, he violently killed the feral cat. He also included grotesque pictures along with the following entry.
When I came home at ~10:30 I was eating pizza bites when I hard my cat Paige scream from the garage.
I quickly enter and the gray cat was attacking her. I then spent the next hour and a half chasing the cat around the garage and stabbing it with my knife (the camo one).
It bled from the mouth at about 11:00 and at about 11:45 I was able to grab the cats tail and wind up and smack the cats head on the concrete ground. I did that a few times and when it went limp I grabber [sic] a hatchet and swung at its neck ~20 times until it came off.
Honestly right now I don’t feel anything about killing that cat. I thought I would be in pain but I literally just feel blank.
He also reportedly has many entries debating whether or not to carry out his plan. He repeatedly states he either needs to kill people or commit suicide. That’s not considered a healthy state of mind.
He also seems to be highly specific and obsessive- like documenting his food intake, often listing time events occurred for no significant reason, researching zip codes with the highest black populations, documenting the number of black people in stores, etc- not to mention the obvious, that this idea of “the great replacement” seemingly occupied his mind for months.
He also at one point claims never to have been diagnosed with a mental health disorder and believed himself to be sane, but at other points questions his sanity.
The cat story is indicative of a serious issue. I’d be curious to know what age this occurred. Defending your pet from another animal is one thing… torturing and dismembering it- not normal. Neither is graphically recounting it in a diary with accompanying photographs- including one of blood splatter on his face. Recording such an event suggests some sort of delight, curiosity, appreciation, etc with the experience. This event would be consistent with antisocial personality disorder.
Some of the other behaviors could be related to OCD. He did wear a hazmat suit to school during COVID, though that could be narcissistic or histrionic behavior- these are “cluster b” traits that often occur with ASPD.
The perpetrator is apparently refusing a psych evaluation by the court which is something I see routinely with narcissists in my field.
A lot of these characteristics, along with his lack of social skills and friends, could also consistent with high functioning autism, but is less likely IMO for a number of reasons.
I really don’t understand where these proclamations come from that “he is not mentally ill”. It’s important to note someone can be seriously mentally ill, the mental illness may be a factor in their crime, and yet they can still be 100% responsible for their crime. A psychopathic murder is well aware killing people is considered morally wrong and is illegal, he just has zero regard for other people.
In this case mental may have made him more likely to hurting others or dwell on his deranged notions but killing people is a choice- he appears to have been very much able to control his behavior, deciding when and where and who to kill. It’s possible/debatable if mental illness made him more susceptible to being radicalized by white supremacists, but ultimately racism is a choice too.
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