17 May 2022 - Buffalo shooting was motivated by white replacement theory
Online posts reveal suspected gunman spent months planning racist attack at a Buffalo supermarket
Travis Caldwell and Alaa Elassar (CNN, 17/05/2022)
Social media posts by the 18-year-old White man suspected of shooting and killing 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket Saturday reveal he had been planning his attack for months.
Alleged gunman Payton S. Gendron of Conklin, New York, shared on the chat app Discord and online forum 4chan that he selected a particular ZIP code in Buffalo because it had the highest percentage of a Black population close enough to where he lived. Police and other officials have described the mass shooting as a hate crime.
A neo-Nazi idea to spark a race war inspired the Buffalo killings
Zack Beauchamp (Vox, 16/05/2022)
The weekend’s mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, was not merely a random act of hate. It was the product of a violent strategy, formulated in obscure neo-Nazi magazines and disseminated on the internet’s darkest corners, that aims to bring about the destruction of American society.
This idea is called “accelerationism,” and violent white supremacists like the Buffalo shooter see it as their best chance to stop the so-called “Great Replacement”: the notion that the West’s white population is being “replaced” with nonwhites, a deliberate demographic shift often blamed on Jewish cabals. Accelerationists believe that race and ethnicity create inherent divisions within Western societies, which individual acts of violence can inflame. The idea is to “accelerate” the crackup of Western governments — and bring on a race war that culminates in white victory.
Buffalo shooting: how white replacement theory keeps inspiring mass murder
Jason Stanley (The Guardian, 15/05/2022)
On Saturday, 18-year-old Payton Gendron parked his car in front of the entrance to a Tops Supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. Exiting the car wearing metal armor and holding an assault rifle, he shot and killed a female employee in front of the store, and a man packing groceries into the trunk of his car. After entering the store, he murdered the store’s guard, and by the end of his killing spree, he had shot 13 people, killing 10 of them.
Eleven of the people he shot were Black, and two were white. As the manifesto he left behind makes clear, this was fully intentional. The first listed goal in his manifesto was to “kill as many blacks as possible”.
More mass shootings are happening at grocery stores – 13% of shooters are motivated by racial hatred, criminologists find
Jillian Peterson and James Densley (The Conversation, 15/05/2022)
An apparently racially motivated attack at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, resulted in 10 deaths on May 14, 2022, with the teenage suspect allegedly targeting Black shoppers in a prominently African American neighborhood.
Mass public shootings in which four or more people are killed have become more frequent, and deadly, in the last decade. And the tragedy in Buffalo is the latest in a recent trend of mass public shootings taking place in retail establishments.