'White supremacist' Payton Gendron appears in court after killing 10 in New York mass shooting

As activists take to the streets of Buffalo, their anguish is plain to see.

ITV News Correspondent Robert Moore reports on the mass shooting


The mass shooting in Buffalo on Saturday afternoon marks another horrendous milestone in the confluence of white supremacist extremism and America's disastrously loose gun laws.

It meant that a teenager filled with deep reservoirs of racial hatred and anti-semitism could pull up at a supermarket armed with an assault weapon and open fire on Saturday afternoon shoppers.

He was wearing military gear, including a bullet proof vest and a combat helmet.Payton Gendron was just 18 years old. He had published online a 180-page manifesto containing far right conspiracy theories, echoing the same language as the 2019 New Zealand extremist who massacred innocents in Christchurch.

He has already appeared in court, charged with first degree murder.

The 18-year-old gunman had previously appeared on police radar after threatening a shooting at his high school and had been sent for mental health treatment, a police official told AP.

At the time, New York State Police troopers had to be called to the Conklin school on June 8 of last year following reports that a 17-year-old student had made threatening statements.

Payton Gendron has already appeared in court. Credit: AP

Gendron - like Brenton Tarrant, the New Zealand gunman - decided to livestream his atrocity. He used the video steaming platform, Twitch.

This was clearly designed to be an attack that resonated through white supremacist circles.

Twitch executives insist they took the video down within two minutes of the attack starting.

The death toll stands at 10, with several other shoppers seriously injured.

Eleven of those killed or wounded are African-American. The supermarket was in a predominantly black neighbourhood of Buffalo.

The FBI are already investigating it as a hate crime.

What happened on Saturday afternoon has already ignited a fierce political storm about whether right-wing media personalities are enabling such acts by giving credence to white supremacist arguments.

It also exposes how the Democrats - despite being in control of the White House, the Senate and the House - have done almost nothing to enact even modest gun reform.

No wonder that anti-gun activists are lamenting this as a massive political failure.

Gun violence is wearily, exhaustingly common. Even the day before, on Friday night, there were three mass shootings in Milwaukee, injuring 17 people.

But Buffalo isn't just a mass shooting. It represents another dark page in the extremist far-right narrative that whites are under threat.

It links to other recent massacres in which hatred and venom spreads online, and intersects with this country's easy access to weapons of war.

Buffalo is grieving. And America faces another day of reckoning with the poison that exists on the fringes.


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