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“A white 18-year-old wearing military gear and livestreaming with a helmet camera opened fire with a rifle at a supermarket in Buffalo, killing 10 people and wounding three others Saturday in what authorities described as ‘racially motivated violent extremism.’” AP News
Many on all sides argue that the gunman’s history should have prompted additional scrutiny from authorities:
“Officials need a better understanding of the concept of ‘leakage,’ which was identified a couple of decades ago as a predictor of future school shooting: A student planning to do something violent would often intentionally or unintentionally reveal something about the impending act… Peers had the most useful information about attack planning, but were the least likely to come forward with relevant information to law enforcement… Last year, the Biden administration released the first-ever US domestic terrorism strategy which contained useful policy prescriptions. This strategy was long overdue.”
Peter Bergen, CNN
“Law enforcement had been warned about Gendron… by his school. Last spring, just before he graduated from high school, Gendron threatened to commit a murder-suicide, according to The New York Times. He was hospitalized, evaluated, and eventually released. The matter was referred to the state police, but Gendron ‘fell off investigators' radar.’ These developments are eerily similar to the situation with Nikolas Cruz, who committed the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida…
“The ‘see something, say something’ ideology behind U.S. policing says that a well-informed and watchful citizenry is expected to actively monitor for threats and report them to law enforcement. When something goes wrong, the people are often blamed for having been inattentive—for missing the signs. But something close to the reverse is usually true: In the Parkland and Buffalo cases, civilians saw something and said something. Unfortunately, the feds didn't pay enough attention.”
Robby Soave, Reason
“He wore a full-blown hazmat suit to school and said he wanted to commit a murder-suicide after graduating. He’d been hospitalized for a mental-health evaluation for a day and half. And he posted a 180-page racist, anti-Semitic manifesto praising mass killers and exposing his own radicalization. Yet the gun dealer who sold him the Bushmaster insisted nothing came up in the background check. Huh?… [He] never should’ve been able to get his hands on the Bushmaster assault-style rifle used in the slaughter. And authorities will never rein in such madness if they focus on merely passing laws rather than enforcing them.”
Editorial Board, New York Post
Other opinions below.
“High-risk mental illness was a known issue for Gendron, whom state police brought to a hospital last June after he wrote in high school about wanting to shoot people. The hospital released him a day and a half later. This story is tragically familiar. In 2017, Martial Simon reportedly ‘told a psychiatrist at the state-run Manhattan Psychiatric Center that it was just a matter of time before he pushed a woman to the train tracks.’ This past January, he pushed Deloitte executive Michelle Go to her death from a Times Square subway platform…
“In addition to these gaps in psychiatric oversight for individuals who have voiced an intention of committing violence, states including New York have reduced in-patient psychiatric beds dramatically. Sweeping criminal-justice reforms have hampered judges’ ability to induce unbalanced offenders into psychiatric care as a means of avoiding jail time. Policymakers at all levels need to prioritize closing these gaps between police, prosecutors, and psychiatric practitioners.”
Hannah E. Meyers, City Journal
“[Journalists on Twitter and national news outlets are] pointing the finger squarely at Fox News and Tucker Carlson with the sole purpose of conflating the antisemitic [replacement] theory peddled online with the very real concerns of an open immigration policy that right now is causing a historic influx of migrants across the southern border, as well as human trafficking and narcotics. These concerns are shared within border communities, which themselves have seen a political demographic shift since the 2020 election, with Hispanics in these family communities turning against traditional Democratic policies…
“In the alleged shooter’s own manifesto, he slanders Fox News as being run by Jews and part of the global replacement theory conspiracy. He never mentions Tucker Carlson. He also disowns the conservative movement, labeling it corporatism, and echoes the sentiments of the far Left when it comes to eco-fascism. But none of this is useful to a media that see this as an opportunity to regain the narrative on policing speech.”
Stephen L. Miller, Washington Examiner
“Is there anybody who doesn’t recognize the Buffalo massacre as a racist abomination, and the (alleged) murderer as the scum of the earth? Of course not! Is there any decent person who doesn’t deplore the racist propaganda on the Internet? No!…
“Do you remember the New York City mass subway shooting? It happened on April 12, just over one month ago. The alleged shooter, Frank James, is a black nationalist who hated all white people, including Jews, and left a lengthy trail of hate messages online. Did we see a national outpouring of media examination of how the normalization of racialized discourse by progressive and mainstream institutions may have contributed to the alleged shooter’s mindset? Don’t be silly.”
Rod Dreher, American Conservative
“The tragedy in Buffalo wasn’t the only mass shooting over the weekend. Two people were killed and at least three wounded at a flea market in Harris County, Tex.; one person was killed and five injured at a church in Orange County, Calif.; 21 people were wounded by gunfire in Milwaukee after a professional basketball semifinal game. Research released last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the rate of the nation’s gun deaths in 2020 reached the highest levels ever recorded, with gun-related homicides increasing 35 percent. Yet Congress refuses to act — on universal background checks, banning assault weapons, requiring safe firearm storage or other common-sense precautions favored by most Americans.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
“In the immediate months following January 6, many (including myself) worried about a wave of ideologically driven violence that did not emerge. But the Buffalo attack proves that the danger is still there, as are the links to the mainstream. Leading conservative figures, including Tucker Carlson and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), have recently pushed sanitized versions of the Great Replacement idea that motivated accelerationist killers from Christchurch on…
“The point is not that these figures literally inspired the Buffalo shooting. Rather, it’s that post-January 6 America is marked by conditions accelerationists have dreamed of: a rising receptivity to fringe racist ideas in the mass public combined with partisans of a major party demonstrating a willingness to use violence against the US government. This does not mean that the accelerationists are likely to succeed in their goal of toppling the government; they are not. But even short of that, the persistence of the idea portends a more dangerous American future.”
Zack Beauchamp, Vox
“The banal notion that immigration has political implications is not the issue. Great-replacement theory distinguishes itself from commonplace observations of political demography in two ways. It casts the phenomenon as a sinister elite conspiracy often (though not necessarily) directed by Jews…
“The other and more dangerous element of the conspiracy theory is its framing of immigrants as ‘replacing’ the native population. Obviously, adding immigrants to the population is a completely different thing than replacing the current population. It is the difference between learning your employer is adding new staff and learning that you are being fired. The rhetorical move of casting immigration as a replacement turns a policy question with normal trade-offs into a zero-sum existential struggle, a war between nations and peoples. These are the steps Carlson has taken repeatedly…
“Ideas exist along a continuum. Almost any idea can be pushed to its extremism and repurposed for violent ends… But some ideas lend themselves more naturally than others to violent terrorism.”
Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
