Blood on the Streets of Buffalo

Welcome to America, where every public place - our schools, our churches, our movie theaters, our music concerts, our city halls, our grocery stores - are just wonderful targets for the gun nut mass shooters who want to rack up a body count. Yesterday, Buffalo joined the list of cities that have suffered gun violence by an AR-15 wielding asshole (per Carolyn Thompson, John Wawrow, Michael Balsamo, and Dave Collins with AP News):

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.”

Police said he shot 11 Black and two white victims before surrendering to authorities in a rampage he broadcast live on the streaming platform Twitch...

One of the things these mass shooters love to do, they love to show off how easy it is for them to kill others.

The massacre sent shockwaves through an unsettled nation gripped with racial tensions, gun violence and a spate of hate crimes. In the day prior to the shooting, Dallas police said they were investigating a series of shootings in Koreatown as hate crimes. The Buffalo attack came just one month after another mass shooting on a Brooklyn subway train wounded 10 people...

The article didn't mention the shootings in Milwaukee the night before, or the number of domestic violence shootings that happen pretty much every day, but we've become so overwhelmed by gun violence the past 20 years it's all a blur now.

The suspected gunman in Saturday’s attack on Tops Friendly Market was identified as (name redacted because the SOB wants to be famous), of Conklin, New York, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southeast of Buffalo.

It wasn’t immediately clear why (redacted) had traveled to Buffalo and that particular grocery store. A clip apparently from his Twitch feed, posted on social media, showed (redacted) arriving at the supermarket in his car.

The gunman shot four people outside the store, three fatally, said Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia. Inside the store, security guard Aaron Salter, a retired Buffalo police officer, fired multiple shots. A bullet hit the gunman’s bulletproof armor but had no effect, Gramaglia said.

The gunman then killed the guard, the commissioner said, then stalked through the store shooting other victims...

There was a "good guy with a gun" at the store, just as the pro-gun advocates say we need to really stop gun violence, but guess what? The mass shooters have access to body armor too, and they plan ahead for that shit. The "good guy with a gun" excuse doesn't work, it never really did. All we have now are just more and more heavily armed people believing they have license to shoot anybody they want.

The shooter also drove over 200 miles, literally going out of his way to find a place where he could find enough targets for his rage to shoot at. This is similar to the shooter who drove eight hours across Texas to attack a Wal-Mart in El Paso.

And much like the mass killer in El Paso, the mass killer in Buffalo was driven by racism, programmed with hateful ideology based on a "Replacement Theory" lie that "Jews and Blacks are going to replace Whites in a massive genocide." Photos of the gunman's assault rifle highlighted the number "14", which refers to the word count of the wingnut motto. Witnesses noticed the N-word painted on the rifle as well. There shouldn't be any confusion about what motivated the mass murderer. Back to the AP article:

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that investigators were looking into whether he had posted a manifesto online. The official was not permitted to speak publicly on the matter and did so on the condition of anonymity.

Buffalo police declined to comment on the document, circulated widely online, that purports to outline the attacker’s racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic beliefs, including a desire to drive all people not of European descent from the U.S. It said he drew inspiration the man who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019...

Each of these mass shooters do not work in a vacuum. They watch others who share the same rage and who share the same bullshit White Power lies. If it's not Christchurch it's getting inspired by the murderer in Norway, or the church shooter in Charleston, or the synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh. These aren't lone wolves: They are part of a global violent movement, raging against the world, feeding off of each other's ill-formed conspiracy junk.

Only it gets worse here in America, because the goddamned Second Amendment is - thanks to an increasingly wingnut Supreme Court - no longer an amendment allowing states to well-regulate their militias, it's become a license for death-worshipping gun nuts to shoot anybody they hate.

And it's worse here in America where we have a Far Right media environment that pumps out that "Replacement Theory" bullshit on a daily basis to where it's programmed White extremists into a conniptic rage. This is an article from last week about Fox Not-News pundit Tucker Carlson (via Cynthia Miller-Idriss at MSNBC):

Before he was indicted on charges of killing 22 people and injuring 26 others in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart in 2019, the identified gunman had been linked to a document posted online that referred to a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The motivation behind that horrific incident — that there is an intentional, global plan orchestrated by national and global elites to replace white, Christian, European populations with nonwhite, non-Christian ones — gets at the core of a recent three-part New York Times series on the rise and ideology of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

In part one of the series, journalist Nicholas Confessore describes Carlson’s efforts to stoke “white fear” of immigrants and changing U.S. demographics as “recasting American racism to present white Americans as an oppressed caste.” In so doing, Confessore shows, Carlson has drawn repeatedly on the leading far-right conspiracy theory of demographic change, known as the “great replacement.”

Coined by a French scholar more than a decade ago, the term was quickly taken up globally by white supremacists, for whom the theory now provides a single, overarching framework for ideas that had already been percolating for years. Last September, Media Matters reported that Carlson spent a year embarking on a “dedicated campaign to insert the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory … into mainstream Republican discourse.” Carlson has repeatedly used the language of replacement to suggest or directly argue that Democrats are orchestrating “demographic replacement” to gain political power. The day before the September Media Matters report, Carlson told his viewers that President Joe Biden aimed to “replace ‘legacy Americans’” and “change the racial mix of the country” for political gain... 

It's not just Carlson and Fox Not-News (via a report from the Anti-Defamation League):

One of the most visible Great Replacement propagandists is Fox media personality Tucker Carlson, who claimed during a September 22 broadcast of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that the point of Biden’s immigration policy is “to reduce the political power of the people whose ancestors live here, and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly-arrived from the third world.” He went on to refer to the policy as “The Great Replacement” which he explained is “the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.”

Carlson’s rhetoric was immediately echoed by U.S. Rep Brian Babin (R-TX-36) in a September 23 Newsmax interview, when he said that Biden and the Democrats are using immigration to "replace the American electorate with a third world electorate."

One day later, Charlie Kirk of the far-right student group Turning Point USA said on his show that Texas should “deputize a citizen force and put them on the border” to protect “white demographics in America.” He added that the left is focused on “bringing in voters that they want, and they like, and honestly, diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America.”

The same day, during an appearance on the Megyn Kelly Show, Tucker Carlson criticized the ADL for calling out his Great Replacement comments and reiterated his view that the Democrats are “going to change the composition of the population and bring in people who will vote for” them.

On September 25, U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL-1) voiced his support for Tucker Carlson and The Great Replacement theory, tweeting, “@TuckerCarlson is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America. The ADL is a racist organization.”

White supremacists celebrate: “We are mainstreaming now...”

All of this talk isn't just talk. It builds up an environment that encourages believers to act out, commit violence towards their targets, justified in their fear and hate that the ones they're killing "deserved" to die. It's known as the George Tiller Effect, where Far Right pundit Bill O'Reilly openly named an abortion doctor often as a threat to the unborn, driving a gunman to kill Tiller in Tiller's own church.

What's happened here - like in El Paso and Charleston and a hundred other racially-motivated mass shootings - is formally known as Stochastic Terrorism: Using a constant barrage of rhetoric and accusations to encourage others to commit violence for your cause. It's stochastic because there's no one specific target named, just a general population to pick and choose, making it "random" enough that the demagogues fueling the rage can claim they weren't responsible. But it's not random, when you look at the bigger picture.

It's still Terrorism: These Far Right White Power wingnuts are convinced they need to kill ethnic minorities, and that they've been given license to do so.

This is the war the Far Right wants: The wingnut pundits and politicians who stoke their audiences to commit acts of insurrection and public displays of violence, they love this shit because they will go onto those Far Right media outlets and actually flip the narrative around to make themselves still be the victims of our outrage while dead bodies pile up in our streets.

They're not even hiding their glee for it anymore.

Goddamn them all.

When, for the Love of God, is someone in our federal government going to recognize these mass shootings are not isolated, they are all part of the same terrorist movement of White Separatist bullshitters, and we need to officially declare them a domestic threat under the Patriot Act? When are we going to admit we're in an actual shooting war with extremists who want to destroy everything a free and diverse America represents?