The 2022 Buffalo Shooting

The 2022 Buffalo Shooting was a racially motivated mass shooting on May 14 at a Tops Friendly Markets in Buffalo, New York. The shooter was Payton Gendron, a white eighteen-year-old male. Dressed in tactical gear and armed with an AR-15-style semiautomatic weapon, Gendron began shooting store customers in the parking lot before making his way into the grocery store. Before surrendering to police, Gendron shot thirteen people, killing ten. Eleven of those shot by Gendron were Black, and two were white. Those murdered ranged in age from twenty to eighty-six. Among them was a heroic retired police officer who shot at Gendron several times to try to keep him from moving farther into the store. Gendron live-streamed the shootings on Twitch, a service used mainly for gaming. However, the service cut him off several minutes into the attack.

Prior to the shooting, the gunman allegedly posted a 180-page document online. In the manifesto, Gendron detailed his plans for the shooting, describing himself as a fascist, a white supremacist, and an anti-Semite, with a goal of killing as many Black people as possible. Gendron claimed to have been radicalized on the Internet during the pandemic.

A few days after the mass shooting, Gendron pleaded not guilty to ten counts of first-degree murder, ten counts of second-degree murder as a hate crime, and three counts of attempted murder as a hate crime. On June 15, 2022, Gendron was also charged with federal hate crimes, making him potentially eligible for the death penalty.

Background

Payton Gendron lived in a blue three-story house in Conklin, New York, a mainly white suburb of Binghamton, with his parents and three younger brothers. Paul and Pam Gendron, his parents, were both civil engineers with the New York Department of Transportation. Coworkers have said that neither parent was racist.

According to Gendron’s online manifesto, his parents did not know that he had purchased assault weapons and had them hidden in his bedroom. They also were not aware that he had been selling coins to pay for his ammunition. He led his mother and father to believe that he was still attending community college when he had quit months ago.

Gendron worked at the Conklin Reliable Market for about four months before quitting. The store’s owner described him as being very quiet. Gendron’s classmates indicated that he was studious, earning high grades, but a loner. They had never known him to be violent.

However, the self-proclaimed white supremacist raised red flags prior to the shooting. When schools were closed during the pandemic, Gendron logged on to a virtual learning program in an economics class. When asked the question, “What do you plan to do when you retire?” Gendron responded, “murder-suicide.” According to some sources, he also made a threatening statement about carrying out a school shooting. Gendron said he was joking, but New York State Police took him into custody and transported him to a mental health facility for an evaluation. Gendron was released a day-and-a-half later.

During the week before his high school graduation when students were allowed to return to on-site learning, Gendron showed up wearing a hazmat suit, complete with boots and gloves. According to his relatives, the pandemic had negatively affected his mental health, and he was extremely paranoid about getting COVID.

Perhaps the most disturbing red flag appeared in an online journal posted by Gendron. In the journal, he described how he stabbed, bludgeoned, and decapitated a feral cat. Gendron justified the act by claiming that the animal had attacked his family’s cat, Paige. Gendron posted detailed notes about how he killed the cat, recording the time when it bled from its mouth and describing the knife that he used to slash its neck. He then posted pictures of the cat’s body, indicating that he felt no empathy for the cat or remorse for killing it.

Mass Shooting

In his diatribe, Gendron said that he had been radicalized during the early months of the pandemic on 4Chan, an anonymous online imageboard. He repeatedly stated his belief in the “great replacement theory.” Supporters of this ideology believe that non-whites are being brought to the United States to replace white voters to achieve a political agenda.

In addition to his 180-page manifesto, Gendron posted at least six hundred pages of archived posts from the messaging app Discord to various websites. In these messages, Gendron announced his plans to kill those he called “replacers” in December. By February, he had chosen to attack customers at a Tops Friendly Markets in Buffalo, selecting the location because of the area’s high Black population. In March, he visited the store to create a map of its aisles and check out its security. During this visit, Gendron was approached by a security guard who asked why he had repeatedly entered the store that day. In his messages, Gendron said that he made up excuses and fled. Initially, Gendron planned to attack two other locations in Buffalo where he would “shoot all blacks.” In his messages, he referred to Tops as “attack area 1.” He used Google’s time feature to determine the busiest times at the store.

After visiting Tops for the first time in March, Gendron created a color-coded map of the store, which he incorporated into his manifesto. He also listed the tactical gear that he planned to wear, which included military-style body armor.

Gendron visited Tops once again on May 13, the day before the shootings. He drove more than 200 miles from Conklin to Buffalo. He used a camera to livestream his actions prior to the killings. As he pulled into Tops’ parking lot, he is heard saying, “Just got to go for it.” He arrived at the market heavily armed and wearing tactical gear. Gendron first opened fire in the parking lot, where he shot four people. When he entered the store, he encountered the retired police officer, who was working as a security guard. He fired several shots at Gendron to keep him from advancing farther into the store, but the gunman’s tactical gear protected him from the bullets. In addition to shooting and killing the retired officer, Gendron shot eight more people in the store. When he encountered Buffalo police officers, he pointed his gun at his neck, but two officers talked him into putting it down, removing some tactical gear, and surrendering.

Aftermath

Following his arrest, Gendron made disturbing statements to law enforcement, indicating that he had targeted Black people during the shooting. When the FBI later raided Gendron’s Conklin home, they found a note that he had left to his parents explaining that he was carrying out the attack because it was best “for the future of the white race.”

The racially motivated 2022 Buffalo mas shooting is one of many that have occurred in the United States. These mass shootings include one at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019 killed twenty-two people. It was the deadliest attack on Latinos in US history. A 2018 mass shooting killed eleven Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In addition to racially motivated mass shootings, the murders at Tops add to the ever-increasing number of mass shootings in general in the United States, which by June surpassed 250 for the year 2022.

Experts contend that easy access to guns enables mass shootings to take place. New York State has a red-flag law designed to stop those who could hurt themselves or others from purchasing firearms. However, even though Gendron threatened a shooting and was admitted into a psychiatric hospital, he was able to pass a background check before legally purchasing an AR-15-style rifle and two other firearms. The May 14, 2022, grocery-store shooting in Buffalo, New York, and the May 24, 2022, school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, during which an eighteen-year-old with an AR-15 killed nineteen children and two teachers, spurred calls for stricter gun laws and a ban on assault weapons. Experts note that if the legal age to purchase a gun had been twenty-one instead of eighteen, both mass shootings may not have occurred.

Hours after the shooting in Buffalo, Gendron was arraigned on one count of first-degree murder. On May 19, he pleaded not guilty to the twenty-five-count indictment against him, which charged him with ten counts of first-degree murder, ten counts of second-degree murder as a hate crime, and three counts of attempted murder as a hate crime. If convicted of these charges, Gendron faces life in prison without parole.

On June 15, Gendron was also charged with multiple federal hate crimes carrying the potential of the death penalty. The charges were made after Attorney General Merrick Garland met with the families of the victims. Seeking to set a precedent for such crimes, Garland said that no one in the United States should have to fear being attacked while working or shopping at a grocery store because of the color of their skin.

Bibliography

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