A gunman opened fire with an assault rifle in a supermarket on Saturday, killing ten people. Investigators assume a racist motive: 11 of the 13 victims were black.
US President Joe Biden will travel to the city in New York state after the deadly Buffalo shooting on Tuesday. The White House said he would mourn there with his wife Jill and the community. A gunman opened fire with an assault rifle at a supermarket on Saturday, killing ten people and wounding three others. Investigators assume a racist motive – 11 of the 13 victims were black.
The police assume, however, that the accused wanted to continue his crime. “We found evidence that he had plans to continue his crime if he had left,” police officer Joseph Gramaglia told CNN on Monday. “He even talked about going to another store.” A 180-page manifesto with racist and violent statements appeared on the Internet, which is attributed to the accused. He would have traveled over 300 kilometers for the crime.
Several American media outlets also described the market as an important meeting place for residents of the district. The 18-year-old suspect was arrested at the scene. He is in custody and is expected to appear before a judge on Thursday. Biden reacted in horror to the act on Saturday and declared war on racist hatred. “We must do everything in our power to end domestic hate-fueled terrorism,” he said. The sniper was armed “with weapons of war” and had a “hateful soul”.
According to police, the accused was in a counseling session last June because of possible psychological problems. He had previously made a “general threat” in his class, said investigator Joseph Gramaglia in Buffalo, a city in the northwest of the state on the Canadian border. In the conversation, however, he did not show any abnormalities that would have led to new entries in his file or a more extensive look at the young man’s mental health, he said. A manifesto said to have come from the author and which contains racist and violent statements also appeared online.
It also talks about the “Grand Replacement Theory”, a far-right conspiracy myth. Thus, non-white members of other religions work specifically to “replace” white Christians with European descent. In the US, this theory is increasingly finding supporters on talk shows on right-wing channels and sections of the Republican Party.
120 gun casualties per day
Saturday’s gun deaths are part of a long list of victims of extremist acts in the United States: Nine black worshipers were shot dead in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. In 2018, eleven people died in a murder in mass at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. In 2019, a man killed 23 people at a supermarket in El Paso, Texas, and later expressed hatred for Latinos there. The FBI ranks extremists who act on racial or ethnic grounds as the biggest threat in domestic terrorism.
In the United States, fatal incidents involving firearms, which are readily available there, often occur regularly. In its most recent statistics for 2020, the CDC health authority reported a total of 45,222 firearm deaths in the US – more than 120 deaths a day. According to a Pew Research Institute assessment, just over half of the cases involved suicide and nearly 20,000 were murders. The “Archive of Armed Violence” website already lists 202 acts as a “mass shooting” for 2022, defined as incidents with four or more wounded or killed by gun violence, excluding the perpetrator.
Also filming in California with political motivation
Also on Sunday, a man killed one person and wounded five others with gunfire at a church in the US state of California. Parishioners at the church in Laguna Woods, south of Los Angeles, had already subdued the suspect and tied his legs with extension cords Sunday afternoon when police arrived, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office said on Twitter. The man comes from China, the worshipers mostly from Taiwan.
US federal police announced Monday that they are investigating a politically motivated hate crime. “It is believed that the suspect was upset about the political tensions between China and Taiwan,” Orange County Sheriff Donald Barnes said, according to media reports. The perpetrator likely targeted Taiwanese society. The suspect, a 68-year-old American citizen from Las Vegas, immigrated from China years ago. According to Barnes, the suspect is believed to have acted alone and had no direct connection to the church or any church members. Apparently, parishioners held back even worse: Barnes said the suspect locked the church doors from the inside before he started shooting. He also had a bag of Molotov cocktails and a bag of extra ammo.
(APA/dpa/Reuters)