What the hell is going though such people’s minds?


We now have yet another mass shooting.

A teenage gunman in military-style clothing opened fire with a rifle at a New York supermarket in what authorities called a “hate crime and racially motived violent extremism”, killing 10 people and wounding three others before surrendering to police on Saturday afternoon, authorities said.

Police officials said the 18-year-old gunman, who is white, was wearing body armor and military-style clothing when he pulled up and opened fire at people at a Tops Friendly Market about 2.30pm, with the shooting streamed via a camera affixed to the man’s helmet.


“He exited his vehicle. He was very heavily armed. He had tactical gear. He had a tactical helmet on. He had a camera that he was livestreaming what he was doing,” city police commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said at a news conference afterward.

According to the Associated Press, the shooting was broadcast live on the streaming platform Twitch for at least two minutes before the service ended his transmission.

Gramaglia said the gunman initially shot four people outside the store, three fatally. Inside the store, a security guard who was a retired Buffalo police officer fired multiple shots at the gunman and struck him, but the bullet hit the gunman’s bulletproof vest and had no effect, Gramaglia added. The commissioner said the gunman then killed the security guard.

Gramaglia said Buffalo police entered the store and confronted the gunman in the vestibule.

“At that point the suspect put the gun to his own neck. Buffalo police personnel – two patrol officers – talked the suspect into dropping the gun. He dropped the gun, took off some of his tactical gear, surrendered at that point. And he was led outside, put in a police car,” he said.

The alleged gunman was identified as 18-year-old Payton Gendron of Conklin, a community about 200 miles (320km) south-east of Buffalo in New York state.

He drove 200 miles to do this? He was livestreaming his murder spree? What would motivate such a horrible act, let alone reveal a desire to show it to the world? Does he just want to have a moment of fame, or rather, infamy? Is this where the desire to achieve fame on social media is taking us?

Comments

  1. sonofrojblake says

    “Is this where the desire to achieve fame on social media is taking us?”

    No. Its where the ridiculously easy availability of guns has brought you to.

  2. mikey says

    It’s what allowing Tucker Carlson to broadcast essentially a white supremacist recruiting call to a national audience has brought us to.

  3. garnetstar says

    White supremacy, the great replacement specifically, is what they’re thinking. This massacre is apparently a copy of the Christchurch one, against different targets.

    Another white supremacist domestic terrorist.

  4. says

    The right wing has spent decades designating internal enemies of America--communists, immigrants, media, BLM protesters etc--all the while insisting on second amendment rights to own and carry guns to defend against enemies. Then they act shocked when somebody puts 2 and 2 together and goes and shoots up a store.
    Next up is the part where they refuse to discuss any change to any law because they don’t want to politicize the tragedy.
    As if politics aren’t how laws are made in this country.
    Second verse, same as the first.

  5. Matt G says

    I drive through this part of New York fairly often. New York is blue because of the big cities. The small towns can be havens for bigotry.

  6. birgerjohansson says

    Tucker Carlson is doing “stochastic terrorism”. Now and then, the memes get enough foothold in a brain to trigger a mass shooting.

  7. johnson catman says

    What the hell is going though such people’s minds?

    Too bad it wasn’t a bullet before he killed all those other people.

  8. lanir says

    I wonder if they’ll figure out who put him up to it. As plans go, it seems rather specific for a teen.

    Oh and watch for someone to blame it on video games so you know who the liars are. Because obviously it’s not that he had access to a whole bunch of dangerous gear, it’s that people copy what they see in video games. But only the really violent ones, never anything like the sports games or racing games of course. It’s only when you shoot someone in a game that you want to copy it and then you magically find guns, ammo and armor laying about, just like in a game. And if you blame it on games you don’t have to look at how someone weaponized a teen’s ignorance of people that look different to turn him into a mass murderer.

  9. says

    He’s white, a social failure, an educational failure, and a member of racist rightwing conspiracy groups. If it turns out he was incel who harassed or assaulted girls in high school or women in college, you’ve got a complete bingo card.

    Read the take from The Daily Beast. The cops claim they “had no idea”. In the online forum (where incompetent cops were not bothering to look or track), the terrorist asked how to shoot through bulletproof vests:

    A user going by the name “Jimboboiii” also sought advice online about body armor and ammunition that could defeat it, according to nonprofit media collective Unicorn Riot. Two years ago, he posted a query on Discord asking how many “non penetrative bullets like 9×19 rounds will it take to go through something like level 4 ceramic body armor?” and, “Would a 30-06 M2 Alternative be better at penetrating armor than a regular M2 Ball? […] I mean M2 alternative i bought some at a gun store the other day.”

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/tops-massacre-suspect-payton-gendron-may-have-spewed-hate-online

    He was captured alive and unharmed because he’s white. Once again, the cops protect their own.

  10. Matt G says

    Intransitive @9- Most Tops shoppers do not wear body armor. Cops, on the other hand, do. Was he considering shooting cops? Still telling that he was apprehended peacefully, as you say.

  11. khms says

    Matt G @10 -- he did shoot an (ex-)cop: the security guard. Thus demonstrating the value of a good guy with a gun, again.

  12. jenorafeuer says

    As other people have been pointing out, his manifesto pretty much boils down into two sections:
    -- A heavily plagiarized version of the Christchurch mosque shooter’ manifesto, with just ‘blacks’ substituted in for ‘muslims’ (and the reason he drove 200 miles was to find a supermarket in an almost entirely all-black neighbourhood)
    -- A detailed list of exactly what equipment he had set up for this, how much it cost, and where he got it.
    The first part is him being a copycat. The second part is him making it a whole lot easier for the next generation of copycats. Stochastic terrorism as a force multiplier.

  13. sonofrojblake says

    @Intransitive, 9:

    . In the online forum (where incompetent cops were not bothering to look or track)

    If the cops tried to look at or track every forum where white losers talk about shooting shit up, and set to work investigating every one who talked like that, that would become the full time job of every police department in the country. The problem is emphatically NOT the preponderance of white, male, socially-inadequate losers thinking up revenge fantasies and posting about it online. Those dorks are everywhere. The problem is that in one particular country, they can walk out of their mom’s basement and buy a fucking assault rifle in a supermarket. And likely even with that ridiculous state of affairs, maybe only one fantasist in a thousand actually does it. So how -- even in principle -- do you identify the signal in all that noise?

  14. auntbenjy says

    Brenton Tarrant flew more than 1300 miles and to a different country to carry out the Christchurch Mosque shootings. And he live-streamed the whole thing.

    He achieved notoriety, and now they all want a piece of it.

  15. John Morales says

    auntbenjy:

    He achieved notoriety, and now they all want a piece of it.

    … yeah, but the concomitant rest of one’s life in jail (at best).

    Not sure that’s worth it for most. So, they don’t all probably want

  16. Silentbob says

    Look, of all mass shootings, we have a pretty good idea of motive here. C’mon people, the shooter posted a 180 page (or something like that) ‘manifesto’ including diagrams of how he intended to carry out the attack.

    I haven’t read it, but I believe the gist is
    -- the believes in ‘Great Replacement Theory’ where ‘the West’ is under existential threat
    -- he believes there must be a race war to save the West
    -- he is trying to incite this race war and hoping others will do the same

    Yes, it’s delusional. And yes, some of it may be ego-driven, like the live-streaming (or perhaps he thought he was engaged in a historical act and wanted a record?) -- I’m just saying the motive here seems cut and dried.

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