Buffalo Shooting Buffalo Shooting: Suspect Lied to Evade a State Red Flag Law

A trove of online messages linked to the suspect also suggest he spent months planning the massacre and espousing racist and antisemitic ideas.

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Jesse McKinleyJonah E. BromwichAndy Newman and

Buffalo suspect planned an attack for months, online posts reveal.

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A woman brings flowers to a memorial outside the Tops supermarket in Buffalo.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

BUFFALO — A cache of online postings suggests months of preparation and planning preceded Saturday’s racist massacre in Buffalo and shows how the suspect evaded a state law that could have prevented him from owning a gun.

New York’s so-called red-flag law took effect in 2019, allowing judges to bar people believed to be dangerous from possessing firearms. Yet Payton S. Gendron, the 18-year-old man accused of killing 10 people at a Tops supermarket on Saturday, was able to buy an assault-style weapon despite having been held for a mental health-evaluation last year after making a threatening remark at his high school.

He described the remark — he responded to a school project question by writing that he wanted to commit a murder-suicide — as a joke, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the case, and was released.

But the postings that came to light on Monday make it evident that Mr. Gendron was lying.

“I got out of it because I stuck with the story that I was getting out of class and I just stupidly wrote that down,” Mr. Gendron wrote. “That is the reason I believe I am still able to purchase guns. It was not a joke, I wrote that down because that’s what I was planning to do.”

The ruse worked: On Monday, state police confirmed that they did not seek a red-flag order against Mr. Gendron, who is now charged with one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history.

The newly discovered writings appear to have been posted on Discord, a chat application, by a user named Jimboboiii before being uploaded to internet forums as a pair of comprehensive documents. They feature thousands of lines of racist, antisemitic and often rambling remarks, and include details on how Mr. Gendron apparently planned and practiced for his attack and paid for his weapons and other equipment.

Jimboboiii was also the name used in a livestream that Mr. Gendron posted on Saturday as he began his attack on Tops, snippets of which circulated online on several platforms before being expunged.

The Discord posts include pictures of Mr. Gendron and extensive details that align with what is publicly known about him, and in many ways mirror a racist screed the authorities have confirmed he published online just before the attack.

The compendium also appears to show that Mr. Gendron fully realized the consequences of his violence. “I am well aware that my actions will effectively ruin my life,” reads one posting from early December. “If I’m not killed during the attack I will go to prison for an inevitable life sentence.”

Since New York’s so-called red-flag law took effect in 2019, judges have issued 589 orders barring people from possessing firearms, according to the state Office of Court Administration. About 18 orders to take guns away from people are issued per month under the law.

The process involves filing an application with the state court system at the county level, stating that a person “is likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others.”

“There’s a real question about whether that law was effectively applied when this person was apparently detained after making threats,” said State Senator Brian Kavanagh, a Democrat who represents parts of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn and who sponsored the bill. “We passed the law specifically to ensure that people who exhibit signs of being dangerous to themselves or others can be denied access to guns.”

Mr. Gendron’s newly discovered online posts also cast doubt on the thoroughness of his mental health evaluation. “I had to spend ~20 hours in that ER waiting for somebody to give me 15 minutes to talk to me,” he wrote. “This proved to me that the US healthcare system is a joke.”

But even the few people close to Mr. Gendron appeared to have little inkling about what was in store. Matthew Casado, 19, said in an interview on Monday that he was one of Mr. Gendron’s only friends, having known him since they were in second grade together.

The friends had gone target shooting in the past, and on Friday, the day before the attack, Mr. Casado said Mr. Gendron unexpectedly showed up at his house and dropped off five boxes of ammunition. Later, Mr. Casado got a text message from Mr. Gendron, who said “he needed space to rearrange his house,” Mr. Casado said. He added that Mr. Gendron said he would return that evening to pick up the bullets. He never did.

A day later, Mr. Casado, who is Latino, learned that his friend was accused of committing the racist massacre.

“Until Saturday, I always knew him as a good person. He was never racist towards me, or around me,” Mr. Casado said in the backyard of his home in Conklin. “I didn’t know he was racist.”

The Discord postings, first reported by The Washington Post, also suggest that Mr. Gendron initially intended to stage his killing on March 15 to correspond with the third anniversary of a 2019 attack at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, a massacre that left 51 people dead.

In a separate screed Mr. Gendron is believed to have posted in the days before the attack on the supermarket, he expressed admiration for the gunman in that killing and another in El Paso in 2019, as well as repeated references to a white supremacist ideology known as replacement theory, which imagines a nefarious scheme to “replace” white Americans — and voters — with immigrants or people of color.

The theory, once confined to conspiracy websites and publications, has found a larger audience in recent years as prominent conservative commentators and lawmakers have helped spread versions of it.

Alex B. Newhouse, the deputy director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said in an interview on Monday that Mr. Gendron might belong to the same pattern of extremism as the shooters in El Paso and Christchurch, and that he sought to bring about complete social destruction.

A lot of Mr. Gendron’s writing “was more of a means to an end than an end itself,” Mr. Newhouse said. “It’s a way to recruit and radicalize people.”

Investigators believe that Mr. Gendron traveled halfway across New York, from his home in a small town near Binghamton, to shoot and kill Black people in east Buffalo, an area known for its large Black population — going so far as to visit the neighborhood the day before the attack in what they described as a reconnaissance mission.

On Monday, police and city officials also confirmed that Mr. Gendron had traveled to Buffalo in early March — seemingly in preparation for his aborted March 15 plan — and that they believed Mr. Gendron had planned a prolonged massacre on Saturday.

Mr. Gendron surrendered to the police after his attack and was charged with first-degree murder, to which he pleaded not guilty. Of the victims of the shooting, several were older shoppers as well as a supermarket security guard. The guard exchanged fire with the suspect, who was protected by body armor and fired a semiautomatic rifle.

President Biden will visit Buffalo on Tuesday to visit with families who lost relatives, including the family of Ruth Whitfield, an 86-year-old grandmother killed while shopping at Tops. On Monday, the Whitfield family expressed grief and outrage, demanding that the nation’s leaders do more to fight white supremacy and the ubiquity of guns often used in such mass shootings.

“We’re tired of losing our loved ones to senseless violence,” said Garnell Whitfield Jr., a former Buffalo fire commissioner, flanked by his siblings as well as Ms. Whitfield’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

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Garnell Whitfield Jr., the former Buffalo fire commissioner whose mother, Ruth Whitfield, was killed in the attack, spoke at a news conference with Mayor Byron Brown.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

At a midday news conference, Mr. Whitfield was joined by Buffalo’s mayor, Byron W. Brown, who also called for gun control measures and improved mental health treatment. He echoed a call made on Sunday by Gov. Kathy Hochul, his fellow Democrat, for measures to stop hate speech from spreading online.

“The availability of guns in this country needs to change,” Mr. Brown said. “People spreading hate through the internet and indoctrinating people in the ways of hate needs to change. The lack of services for people with mental health issues needs to change.”

Another victim of the shooting, 72-year-old Katherine Massey, had seemingly been well aware of the danger, penning a letter last year to The Buffalo News, according to the newspaper, in which she argued for “extensive federal action/legislation to address” gun violence.

Mr. Gendron had recently purchased a Bushmaster assault weapon near his home in Conklin, N.Y., according to Robert Donald, the owner of Vintage Firearms in Endicott, N.Y., who primarily sells collectible firearms.

In Mr. Gendron’s home county, Broome, there have been 11 red-flag orders, or about one for every 18,000 residents — roughly average for the state. The court system does not track the number of applications that were denied.

Nineteen states have enacted such laws, including Virginia and New Mexico as recently as 2020. Because almost all have been enacted within the past 10 years, there is limited research on their effectiveness.

The law enforcement official who had been briefed on the call about Mr. Gendron last year said that in New York, hundreds of school threats are called in annually — including three on Monday in the wake of the massacre — and that in each case, authorities interview students and parents to determine whether students have access to guns. The authorities then try to make a reasoned call on what action to take.

The shooting in Buffalo — New York’s second most-populous city — has shaken many Black residents who say they have endured discrimination and segregation there.

That tension has been intensified by false alarms about other shootings as well as Monday’s arrest of a local man, Joseph S. Chowaniec, 52, who was charged by the Erie County district attorney, John J. Flynn, with making threatening calls to two local businesses on Sunday in which he referenced the shooting at Tops.

At a news conference on Monday afternoon, Mr. Flynn pleaded for patience from the public, noting that Mr. Gendron is innocent until proven guilty. Still, even some elected officials seemed frustrated by prospect that justice might be delayed too long.

“This young man was walking around with a camera on his head: He showed the whole world what he was doing,” said Assemblywoman Crystal Peoples-Stokes, a Buffalo Democrat who serves as State Assembly majority leader and is Black. “And I understand that they got to go through a court. I get that. But a lot of the anger that people have inside is from the fact that their loved ones have been murdered for going to the supermarket.”

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John Flynn, the Erie County district attorney, asked for patience as prosecutors prepare the case against the suspect.Credit...Joshua Bessex/Associated Press

Such sentiments were also expressed by Mr. Whitfield, whose family is being represented by the civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump. Mr. Crump said he and a legal team were considering lawsuits against a wide variety of people and institutions — including cable news stations and politicians — he called “the root of the hate.”

“Even though they may not have pulled the trigger,” Mr. Crump said, “They loaded the gun.”

Mr. Whitfield, the former fire commissioner, was emotional in speaking of his mother, Ruth, whom he described as a loving force — “My mom was my heart,” he said — whose death had “forever changed, forever damaged” his family.

At the same time, he said he planned to fight for changes to laws to make such massacres more difficult.

“We’re going to cry, and we’re going to grieve,” he said. “But that’s not all we’re going to do.”

Ashley Southall and Troy Closson contributed reporting.

Michael Grynbaum
May 16, 2022, 9:26 p.m. ET

Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host who has been criticized for amplifying the "great replacement theory" cited by the suspect in the Buffalo massacre, condemned the mass shooting on his Monday broadcast. But he quickly pivoted to attacking Democratic leaders who, he said, used the event to “blame those murders on their political opponents.” Carlson called the suspect's letter “definitely racist, bitterly so,” but argued that it was “not really political,” but rather “a rambling pastiche of slogans and internet memes” written by a mentally ill individual.

Shane GoldmacherLuke Broadwater
May 16, 2022, 9:07 p.m. ET

Republicans play on fears of ‘great replacement’ in bid for base voters.

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Former President Donald J. Trump hosted a rally in Greensburg, Pa., where he railed against “illegal aliens.”Credit...Kristian Thacker for The New York Times

The mass shooting in Buffalo was the work of a lone gunman but not the product of an isolated ideology.

In a manifesto, the suspect detailed how he viewed Black people as “replacers” of white Americans. The massacre at the grocery store on Saturday trained a harsh light on the “great replacement theory,” which the authorities say he used to justify an act of racist violence — and on how that theory has migrated from the far-right fringes of American discourse toward the center of Republican politics.

Republicans across the spectrum were quick to denounce the killings. But fewer party leaders appeared willing to break with the politics of nativism and fear the party has embraced to retain the loyalties of right-wing voters inspired by Donald J. Trump.

One Republican, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, on Monday called out her colleagues for not doing enough to squash the extremist wing of her own party.

“House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-Semitism,” Ms. Cheney, the former No. 3 House Republican who was removed from that role over her criticism of Mr. Trump, wrote on Twitter. “History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. @GOP leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.”

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“History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse,” Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming said on Monday.Credit...Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

House Republican leaders have at times tolerated the extremist views from some in their ranks. Last year, far-right Republican members of Congress circulated plans to create an “America First Caucus,” where the section on immigration talked about the importance of “uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions.” The idea was scrapped but those involved continued to make waves for their flirtation with white nationalism.

In February, when Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona participated in a conference organized by Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist, Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, called their actions “appalling and wrong,” but he did not formally rebuke or punish them.

Since then, Republicans have used rhetoric that suggests a tacit willingness to try to appeal to elements of the far right. Ahead of November’s midterm elections, Republican candidates have ramped up warnings about the threats being posed to what is cast as real or traditional America. Often unsaid is what that bygone era looks like: white, male-dominated, Judeo-Christian and heterosexual.

Issue after issue has been recast as a reason for Republican voters to fear for their culture and values: Transgender rights threaten girls sports. The removal of statues threatens to expunge Confederate history in the South and other white historical figures elsewhere. Critical race theory is portrayed as rewriting American history — and overhauling how it is taught — to emphasize episodes of racism.

Even the recent baby formula shortage has been falsely reimagined as so acute because of giveaways to feed undocumented children.

More than a dozen candidates and outside groups have run ads warning of an immigrant “invasion” in the country or otherwise diluting the power of native-born citizens. Several candidates have falsely said that Democrats are opening the border specifically to let undocumented people in to vote.

“If Joe Biden keeps shipping illegal immigrants into our states, we’re all going to have to learn Spanish,” Gov. Kay Ivey, Republican of Alabama, said in one television ad ahead of her May 24 primary.

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Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama is among the Republican candidates who have warned of the false threat of illegal immigrants’ voting.Credit...Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters

In another, Ms. Ivey held up her conservative state as a bastion of disappearing values: “When I taught school, we said a prayer, pledged allegiance, and taught the basics,” she said. “Today, the left teaches kids to hate America. But not here. Biden’s critical race theory: racist, wrong and dead as a doornail. Transgender sports: toast.”

Republicans have pushed back aggressively against accusations that their language and actions have perpetuated the kind of racism and xenophobia that appeared to be behind the massacre in Buffalo.

The stoking of fear and grievances was a hallmark of Mr. Trump’s rise, though its roots far predate him. A quarter-century earlier, Pat Buchanan fashioned himself as an “America first” candidate in his right-wing challenge to former President George Bush in 1992, a tagline that Mr. Trump would repurpose. But Mr. Buchanan, who lost the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and again in 1996, was largely shunned by his party for writing about “immigrant invasions” eroding Western society.

Mr. Trump opened his 2016 presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and soon after he promoted a ban on Muslims entering the country. At the time, many top party officials reacted with outrage.

Now, much of the Republican Party and the conservative media apparatus are speaking with the same nationalistic voice, from Tucker Carlson on Fox News in prime time to even more hard-right alternatives like Newsmax and One America News Network.

Mr. Trump no longer seems to be driving the conversation on the right so much as keeping up with it.

At a rally in western Pennsylvania this month, he railed against the “illegal aliens” he said were pouring “into our homeland.”

“Our country is full, we can’t take it anymore,” he said. “They are trying to destroy our country.”

“Unfortunately, the party is becoming one of resentment and anger as opposed to solutions and common ground,” said Mike DuHaime, a longtime Republican strategist. He did not predict it would hamper Republicans in elections this year but said it would pose a challenge eventually. “Resentment and anger can get you short-term victories but it won’t build a governing coalition to build long-term policy change.”

Mainstream Republicans have repeatedly suggested that lax enforcement of the border is somehow part of a longer-term Democratic strategy. In Missouri, Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Senate candidate, said on Glenn Beck’s program last month that Democrats were “fundamentally trying to change this country through their illegal immigration policy.”

Other Republicans have been more specific, suggesting Democrats have political aims.

In Wisconsin, Senator Ron Johnson, who is up for re-election this fall, said last year that “you have to ask yourself why” the Biden administration wanted, as he put it, open borders. “Is it really,” he postulated, “they want to remake the demographics of America to insure their — that they stay in power forever?” (On Monday evening, he tweeted: “Pushing the lie that criticizing this admin’s policies in any way supports ‘replacement theory’ is another example of the corporate media working overtime to cover up the Biden admin’s failures.”)

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J.D. Vance with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia during his campaign for the Republican Senate nomination in Ohio last month.Credit...Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

And in Ohio, the Senate candidate J.D. Vance pre-empted potential accusations of racism. “Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans?” he asked in his campaign’s opening television ad. Later in the spot, he spoke about how loose border policies were there to ensure “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”

This strategy reclaiming the racist label — and recasting oneself as the victim — has also been used by Blake Masters, a Senate candidate in Arizona, who is backed by the same billionaire, Peter Thiel, as Mr. Vance.

“If you connect the dots as a candidate for office and say, look, obviously the Democrats, they hope to just change the demographics of our country,” Mr. Masters said in a podcast interview last month. “They hope to import an entirely new electorate and they call you a racist and a bigot.”

Political scientists and historians say the harsher, more dehumanizing language stirring fear of demographic change has became more pervasive and salient among Republican voters as pro-business Republicans who were once vocally in favor of immigration have become fewer among their ranks and Republican leaders have declined to push back against the more extreme political language.

The great replacement theory has its origins in France, where it was popularized by a book of the same title published in 2012 by the novelist and critic Renaud Camus. Mr. Camus chiefly argued that demographic shifts in majority white, Christian countries in Europe threaten “ethnic and civilizational substitution.”

By 2017, white supremacist groups embraced Mr. Camus’ ideas, employing antisemitic conspiracy theories. They adopted a new slogan — alternately “Jews will not replace us” or “You will not replace us” — chanted at rallies, most infamously at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., that August, where a white nationalist killed a counterprotester. White supremacists who committed mass killings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Tex., in 2019 both referred to the theory in their respective manifestoes.

“These conspiracies are at the core of the Republican Party right now and I don’t think it’s partisan to say that,” said Amy Spitalnick, the executive director of Integrity First for America, which won a lawsuit against the organizers of the 2017 Charlottesville rally.

Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, who represents a district in Northern New York and who replaced Ms. Cheney last year as the No. 3 House Republican, ran an online ad last fall about how “amnesty” to the undocumented would “overthrow our current electorate.”

Her office put out a statement on Monday accusing the news media of “disgraceful, dishonest and dangerous” smears in linking her rhetoric to the Buffalo attack in any way.

“The shooting was an act of evil,” said her spokesman, Alex DeGrasse, who added in a statement about “illegals” that she “has never advocated for any racist position or made a racist statement.”

Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Senate Republican, said on Monday that “it’s unfortunate that there are sites out there where these people go and get these crazy ideas in their head and act on it.” When asked about his colleagues who have repeated elements of replacement theory, he added: “Nobody should be giving voice to or support in any way to some of these things.”

Reporting was contributed by Azi Paybarah, Karen Yourish, Jennifer Medina, Jazmine Ulloa and Charles Homans.

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Ali Watkins
May 16, 2022, 8:45 p.m. ET

‘Uncle Teeny,’ who worked at Tops, was known as a ‘helping heart.’

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Credit...Malik Rainey for The New York Times

Teniqua Clark saw the video flash across her Twitter feed: an active shooter, opening fire at a grocery store, killing people at point blank range.

“It was just crazy,” she said. Watching the video, she noticed a Ford Fusion parked outside the entrance, the same kind of car her great uncle had worked so hard to buy, just a year ago.

It would be hours before Ms. Clark learned that the shooting she had watched had been in Buffalo, her hometown, and the car was more tragically familiar than she could have imagined: Heyward Patterson, her great uncle who was known affectionately as Uncle Teeny among his cadre of nieces and nephews, had been shot and killed in the video Ms. Clark watched.

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Heyward Patterson, a victim of the Buffalo shooting, in a photo provided by his nephew Terrell Clark.

Born and raised in the city, Mr. Heyward was a fixture in the northeast Buffalo neighborhood, and specifically, a daily presence at the Jefferson Avenue Tops. For years since retiring, Mr. Heyward worked informally at the grocery store every day, helping customers with deliveries using his car. It’s what Ms. Clark believes he was doing, based on her viewing of the video — her uncle, it seems, was shot and killed in the parking lot.

“He didn’t even have a chance,” Ms. Clark said.

Mr. Patterson was thrilled early last year when he was finally able to purchase a brand new Ford Fusion, which he used on the job, his nephew, Terrell Clark, Ms. Clark’s father, said. It was how he made a living in retirement, but the jitney job wasn’t just for money — in the aftermath of his death, customers and friends have shared stories, Ms. Clark said, of forgotten items and kind detours that Mr. Patterson took without charge. One woman said he once diverted his route and returned her forgotten bag to her, refusing payment.

“He’s a helping heart,” Ms. Clark said.

Known for giving advice to his younger nieces and nephews, Mr. Patterson was a pillar of his church, where he loved to sing. He was a father, and an avid fan of the Buffalo Bills, his nephew said.

Like Ms. Clark, Mr. Clark associated his uncle immediately with the Tops grocery store. Minutes after he heard of the danger on Saturday, he sent a message on Facebook:

“Unc you ok?”

The message was never marked as read.

Mihir Zaveri and Emma Bubola contributed reporting.

Glenn Thrush
May 16, 2022, 8:17 p.m. ET

What do most mass shooters have in common? They bought their guns legally.

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A memorial outside the grocery store in Buffalo where a gunman killed 10 people on Saturday.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Of all the wrenching similarities between the massacres at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the Walmart in El Paso and the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, one stands out most starkly: Each gun used was purchased legally.

From 1966 to 2019, 77 percent of mass shooters obtained the weapons they used in their crimes through legal purchases, according to a comprehensive survey of law enforcement data, academic papers and news accounts compiled by the National Institute of Justice, the research wing of the Justice Department.

In upstate New York a few months ago, the 18-year-old suspect in the Buffalo shooting walked into Vintage Firearms in sleepy Endicott, passed an instant background check without a glitch and bought a used Bushmaster XM-15 semiautomatic rifle, a copy of the ubiquitous AR-15 used in many other mass shootings.

The suspect, Payton Gendron, had recently been required to undergo psychological evaluation after making menacing, violent comments to high school classmates, but the episode was not enough to set off the state’s “red flag” law, which bars the mentally ill from buying weapons.

Then he went home, borrowed his father’s electric drill, and removed a restraining bolt, required by state law, that limited its capacity to a 10-round clip. That modification allowed him to load multiple 30-round magazines, making it easier for him to hunt, target and kill Black people, according to a manifesto he posted online.

While mass shootings, defined by many experts as episodes involving four or more fatalities, represent a relatively small percentage of overall gun crimes, they have risen drastically in recent years, with at least eight of the 20 deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history taking place since 2014.

That a majority of these criminals have made their gateway purchases though legal means reflects the profound inadequacy of local, state and federal statutes to detect or deter mass shooters, say law enforcement officials, researchers and the families of people they killed.

“The reality in this country right now, is that anyone who wants to cause harm to themselves, or do someone else harm, can easily acquire the means to do so — legally,” said Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was killed in the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., in 2018.

“Based on what we know about Buffalo, the system seems to have been followed, but the problem is with the system itself,” he added. “The reality of life in America, the big problem, is that these people don’t have to jump through enough hurdles to get a gun.”

The Biden administration renewed its calls to ban semiautomatic weapons and expand national background checks in the wake of the attack in Buffalo on Saturday, as it has done time and again after mass shootings. While White House officials have taken some executive actions — such as nominating a permanent director to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — their legislative efforts have little chance of success.

At the state level, hopes for new gun control measures are even bleaker.

One by one, Republican-controlled state legislatures have enacted laws to undo existing gun regulations that place restrictions on the purchase and carrying of firearms, while some states, like Missouri, are challenging the federal government’s right to impose any regulation on firearms.

The biggest threat to gun control looms just over the horizon: Over the next month or two, the Supreme Court is expected to strike down all or part of a New York State law that curtails the concealed possession of a gun without a special permit, a case seen as a potential landmark decision that could invalidate dozens of similar laws in liberal-leaning states.

“The infuriating part is that we seem to be going backward,” said James Densley, a co-founder of the Violence Project, a nonpartisan research center that compiled the data used in the National Institute of Justice report.

While it is hard to make broad generalizations, Mr. Densley and his partner, Jillian Peterson, discerned several patterns among gunmen in recent mass shootings. Many have clean records and can buy guns legally. If they are underage or young adults, they often obtain guns as gifts from the parents — or borrow or steal weapons from their house.

Many favor long guns, like AR-15s and AK-47s. Semiautomatic rifles account for fewer than 1 percent of overall shootings in the United States, they found — but 25 percent of mass shootings.

And many of those accused of these crimes, like the suspect in the Buffalo shooting, see their killings as public performance, making them inclined to stealthily plan their attacks until they take action, in hopes of maximizing the attention paid to them. That makes them harder to detect, even in a state with relatively strong gun laws, like New York.

“In a lot of cases, you can’t really stop people from buying a gun, unless they are disqualified because they have committed a felony, or because they have been involuntary committed to a mental hospital,” Mr. Densley added. “It doesn’t matter if the red flags are there. The legal bar is high.”

The 19-year-old attacker who killed Jaime Guttenberg and 16 others in Parkland bought his Smith & Wesson M&P15, another AR-15 clone, from a licensed dealer after passing an instant background check, even though school officials warned local law enforcement he had made violent, racist threats.

The 21-year-old man who murdered more than 20 people at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019 targeted Latinos and espoused many of the same racist theories as Mr. Gendron. He ordered his AK-47 clone online, from Romania, and later picked up the gun and ammunition at a Dallas-area gun shop after passing the requisite background checks.

The antisemitic extremist who killed 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 also legally bought the weapon he used.

T. Christian Heyne, the vice president of the gun control group Brady, said the only way to stop mass killings was to enact strengthened universal federal background checks, to compensate for the wide variation in state and local laws. But that proposal has stalled in the Senate despite enjoying overwhelming public support.

“Without a federal baseline, we can’t achieve anything,” he said. “We have just had a report showing gun violence is at historic levels, and now his happens. What are we going to do about it as a country? Are we really this desensitized?”

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The suspect in Saturday’s mass shooting at a Buffalo grocery store was able to legally purchase a semiautomatic rifle.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

Robert Donald, the owner of the store in Endicott who sold Mr. Gendron his gun, was stunned when federal law enforcement officials contacted him about the purchase.

He said nothing about the young man raised any suspicions; in fact, he hardly remembered him at all. But he told The New York Times on Sunday that “any gun can be easily modified if you really want to do it,” when asked about the illegal modifications Mr. Gendron made to the Bushmaster.

For his part, Mr. Gendron boasted of his handiwork, complete with painstakingly composed how-to pictures, in his online manifesto.

The document is 180 pages. About half of it is a racial screed. About half of it is devoted to a matter-of-fact discussion of the ideal gear — guns, ammunition, pistol grips, body armor, helmets — to buy, online or at flea markets, when planning a mass shooting.

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Annie Karni
May 16, 2022, 8:13 p.m. ET

Racist attack spotlights Elise Stefanik’s echo of replacement theory.

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Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, is under scrutiny for having echoed the racist “great replacement” theory in campaign advertisements.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Over the past week, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the third-ranking House Republican, has blasted President Biden for providing infant formula to undocumented immigrants while “American mothers” suffer amid a nationwide formula shortage.

She has attacked Democrats and “pedo grifters,” borrowing language from the baseless pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory that claims there is a Satan-worshipping cabal of liberal pedophiles, which has evolved into a movement on the right.

And after the deadly mass shooting in Buffalo, where a heavily armed white man is accused of killing 10 Black people at a supermarket in a racist rampage, Ms. Stefanik is under scrutiny for campaign advertisements she has circulated that play on themes of the white supremacist “great replacement” theory. That belief, espoused by the Buffalo gunman, holds that the elite class, sometimes manipulated by Jews, wants to “replace” and disempower white Americans.

Last year, in an ad on Facebook, Ms. Stefanik accused “radical Democrats” of planning what she described as a “PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION.”

“Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington,” the ad said.

Ms. Stefanik, a onetime moderate Republican who worked in President George W. Bush’s White House and was a protégé of former Speaker Paul D. Ryan, has long been seen as a rising star in her party, and she still is. But as she has ascended, the Republican Party has transformed, lurching to the right along with her district in upstate New York, and she has shape-shifted along with it.

Now, she proudly describes herself as an “ultra MAGA” warrior and aggressively appeals to the hard right, sounding nativist themes that animate the Republican base.

The racist massacre, which unfolded in her own state, has shone a spotlight on Ms. Stefanik. In the days since, Democrats and even some Republicans have suggested that Ms. Stefanik and her party have stoked the beliefs that led to the killings, by catering to a base that will not tolerate outright condemnation of the most fringe ideas.

Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, who was ousted last year as conference chair and replaced by Ms. Stefanik, said on Monday that House Republican leaders had “enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and antisemitism.” In a posting on Twitter, she called on her party’s leaders to “renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.”

But as Democrats decried the white supremacist ideology that gave rise to the mass killing, Ms. Stefanik and other House Republican leaders were largely silent about the racism that apparently motivated the shooter.

Far from apologizing for the nativist language and themes she has amplified, Ms. Stefanik, who has been floated to former President Donald J. Trump as a potential running mate and who is widely seen in Congress as a candidate to become her party’s next House whip, is following Mr. Trump’s example.

Like Mr. Trump, Ms. Stefanik’s response when under fire is to attack her attackers. Like Mr. Trump, she vehemently defends herself against charges of holding any racist views, while at the same time using rhetoric that energizes far-right and fringe groups.

On Monday, she released a lengthy statement attacking the media for reporting on statements she has made that echo replacement theory claims, but never disavowed the ideology, and did not condemn racism or white supremacy.

Later, asked in a brief exchange whether she would disavow or repudiate replacement theory, Ms. Stefanik did not, saying: “I condemn any form of racism.”

Aides to Ms. Stefanik said the Facebook advertisement being criticized was addressing the need for stronger border security, and referring to Mr. Biden’s proposal to offer a pathway to U.S. citizenship for nearly 11 million undocumented people and a proposal to give 800,000 noncitizens in New York the right to vote in municipal elections.

And they said her reference to “pedo grifters” had not been to QAnon, but to John Weaver, a Never Trump operative who had made sexual overtures to young men, and whose former colleagues Ms. Stefanik blames for dubbing her #EliseStarvefanik on Twitter after her complaints about undocumented infants receiving formula.

Democrats were quick to point out that attacks like those Ms. Stefanik have lodged have at their core the same grievance as replacement theory.

“The subtext is clear,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said in a speech. “These hard-right MAGA Republicans argue that people of color and minority communities are somehow posing a threat — a threat — to the American way of life.”

Ms. Stefanik has also refrained from calling out extremists in her party’s ranks who are explicit about such views. Earlier this year, she refused to denounce Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, after Ms. Greene spoke at a white nationalist event.

“They represent their constituents, and they are held accountable for the statements they make,” Ms. Stefanik said in an interview in March, saying that the House Republican conference as a whole did not share Ms. Greene’s views.

Ms. Stefanik, a Harvard graduate who once privately conceded to friends that Mr. Trump was a liability for her party, has embraced her role as one of his unequivocal supporters. After Mr. Biden derided Republicans who have refashioned themselves in the mold of Mr. Trump as “ultra MAGA,” Ms. Stefanik turned the criticism into a fund-raising opportunity. Her campaign now sells T-shirts that read, “I am ultra MAGA and proud of it.”

The approach suggests that Ms. Stefanik sees little downside in being viewed as extreme; the only political risk she fears is being regarded as insufficiently hard-line. In an interview on the sidelines of the Republican retreat outside Jacksonville in March, Ms. Stefanik repeatedly echoed Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen and refused to acknowledge Mr. Biden as the legitimately elected president.

Afterward, an aide followed up to reinforce that she had repeated the false election claims and refused to accept Mr. Biden’s legitimacy, making sure those points were not lost on the reporter.

Still, while Ms. Stefanik has aggressively courted the far right, she has also worked to maintain a veil of respectability within her party, working to remain palatable to donors.

To ensure a future in the Republican Party, said Bill Kristol, the prominent Never-Trump Republican, “you want The Wall Street Journal to feel OK about supporting you, but you also want networks like O.A.N.N. and hosts like Tucker Carlson saying, ‘Yeah she’s pretty good.’ ”

Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump White House official who now hosts an influential podcast on the right, said Ms. Stefanik could not care less about criticism from the left, using an expletive for emphasis.

What keeps her up at night, Mr. Bannon said, is any threat from the right.

“She’s in a competition right now with Representative Jim Banks about who is going farther right,” he said, referring to the Indiana Republican and chairman of the Republican Study Committee, who has also refashioned himself from a movement conservative into a Trump acolyte as he seeks to rise in power in Washington.

Some of Ms. Stefanik’s recent moves, people close to her said, appeared to be motivated by her internal competition with Mr. Banks.

Last week, Mr. Banks was one of 56 Republicans who voted against a $40 billion package of aid for Ukraine. Ms. Stefanik voted for the bill, drawing criticism from the right for doing so.

Ms. Stefanik had reservations, said people familiar with her thinking, and raised concerns about the optics of sending so much money abroad amid so many challenges at home. But she ultimately sided with the majority of the conference, and with the Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, and voted for the bill.

A correction was made on 
May 17, 2022

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to a tweet in which Representative Elise Stefanik attacked Democrats and used the phrase “pedo grifters.” Her posting, borrowing language from the baseless pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory, referred to “Democrats and the usual pedo grifters.” It did not describe Democrats as “pedo grifters.”

How we handle corrections

Troy Closson
May 16, 2022, 8:00 p.m. ET

The closing of the Tops market on Buffalo’s East Side has created a ‘food desert.’

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A gunman unleashed a racist attack on shoppers at Tops on Saturday, killing 10 of them.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

Across Buffalo’s East Side, many Black residents live in what is known as a “food desert” — an area with little access to low-cost, healthy selections. But when the Tops market opened on Jefferson Avenue in 2003, it helped fill a crucial need for the Masten Park neighborhood and surrounding areas.

The grocery store’s importance was once again apparent this weekend after a gunman unleashed a racist attack on shoppers at the store, killing 10, injuring three more and prompting the indefinite closure of a crucial community hub.

To close the gap, a food distribution center at the Resource Council of WNY building will remain open until at least May 27, local officials said at a news conference on Monday.

Located a few blocks from the massacre, at 347 E. Ferry Street, volunteers at refrigerated trucks are passing out bread, milk, eggs and other goods “so individuals do not have to travel out of their neighborhood to access fresh, quality food,” officials said.

“There was a significant line of individuals today,” ” said Mark C. Poloncarz, the Erie County executive. “We may open another site in the immediate area so that there’s sufficient locations for the public to get to. If we do open that other site, we will announce it.”

He added: “There are, of course, neighborhood stores that exist. But many of them don’t have fresh fruit and meats and vegetables.”

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A free shuttle bus took local residents to another Tops supermarket in the Buffalo city center.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

In Buffalo, Black residents are six times more likely than white neighbors to live in an area without a grocery store, according to a 2018 report from the Partnership for the Public Good. In interviews, many residents have feared the effects of the Tops closure may ripple for months.

“I know there are a lot of people organizing to get food,” said J Coley, a Ph.D. student and instructor in the University at Buffalo’s sociology department. “But we know eventually after the weeks go by, people will stop thinking about it. I’m just worried about how people are going to be able to access food in the long term.”

Community organizations have fanned out across the area to help. Hundreds of residents traveled to the Buffalo Community Fridge on Sunday to pick up groceries. Several food pantries are organized at churches and local organizations. And some local schools are giving out donations to those in need of meals.

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Volunteers from the Buffalo Community Fridge bagged up food for residents of the area served by the Tops supermarket on Jefferson Avenue, which is closed.Credit...Malik Rainey for The New York Times

The supermarket chain also said this weekend that on Monday, it would begin to provide free bus shuttle service to residents, starting Monday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. from Jefferson Avenue and Riley Street to stores on Elmwood Avenue, in the city center.

Law enforcement officials at the news conference did not specify when investigators would leave the area and remove police tape around the Jefferson Avenue store.

The chain said on social media on Sunday that the market will “remain closed until further notice,” but added “we are steadfast in our commitment to serving every corner of our community.”

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Chelsia Rose Marcius
May 16, 2022, 7:56 p.m. ET

‘I didn’t know he was racist,’ said one of the suspect’s only friends.

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“I was one of the only friends, if not the only friend, he had,” said Matthew Casado, who knew the suspect since second grade.Credit...Scott Olson/Getty Images

On Friday, the day before the authorities say Payton S. Gendron shot and killed 10 people at a Buffalo grocery store, he unexpectedly showed up at his friend Matthew Casado’s house and dropped off five boxes of ammunition.

Mr. Casado, 19 — who has known Mr. Gendron since second grade — received a text from Mr. Gendron that afternoon.

Mr. Gendron said “he needed space to rearrange his house,” and added that he would return that evening to pick up the bullets, Mr. Casado said.

Mr. Gendron never returned. A day later, Mr. Casado, who is Latino, learned that his friend was accused of committing the mass shooting, one of the nation’s worst racist massacres in years.

“Until Saturday, I always knew him as a good person. He was never racist towards me, or around me,” Mr. Casado said in the backyard of his home in Conklin, N.Y. “I didn’t know he was racist.”

Mr. Casado played baseball with Mr. Gendron in elementary school. As they got older, they played video games like Minecraft and Rocket League. Yet Gendron never played violent video games because his parents forbade it, and he respected their wishes, Mr. Casado said.

The friends also shot together for target practice. Mr. Casado said Mr. Gendron “loved talking about guns” and that he “admired the different calibers, the different work that went into making these firearms.”

“I was one of the only friends, if not the only friend, he had,” Mr. Casado said. “After about the 11th grade, he was considered weird because he didn’t talk very much and nobody wanted to hang out with him.”

May 16, 2022, 7:26 p.m. ET

The suspect recorded months’ worth of preparation in an online chat log.

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The messages describe months spent gathering gear and documented several trips to a gun store before the attack on a supermarket in a predominantly Black area.Credit...Brendan McDermid/Reuters

For months before the mass shooting in Buffalo that killed 10 people, a teenager mulled potential targets, posted racist and antisemitic memes and messages and updated his plans.

He considered targeting a predominantly Black elementary school in Buffalo, but decided it would be too difficult to enter. He mulled traveling to Rochester for an attack, or even to Maryland, but admitted of the second target, “I don’t have a plan for that.”

In the days before the attack, he posted pictures of himself and of a gun, on which he’d written in Wite-Out the names of other mass shooters.

The messages appear to have been posted on the chat application Discord by a writer who identified himself as Payton Gendron, before they were uploaded to internet forums as a pair of comprehensive documents.

Commencing in November and ending shortly before the attack, they lay out in excruciating detail the racist and violent ideology that drove the young man who now stands accused of the massacre at a grocery store in Buffalo, which he targeted because it was in a predominantly Black area.

They also suggest that there was ample warning of his plans, had investigators known where to look.

The transcripts contain pictures of Mr. Gendron, and the posts came from a handle that he used on several social platforms, though Discord, which declined to comment, has not confirmed that he sent them.

It is unclear whether the chats, which appear to have been posted on a private server within Discord, were shared with others in real time or assembled for a future audience.

But they indicate that the writer expected to eventually reach a like-minded community. He even requests that others continue to update the compendium with additional posts.

He also anticipated an investigation, making reference to F.B.I. agents searching his room.

The Buffalo police commissioner, Joseph A. Gramaglia, declined to comment on the Discord logs at a news conference Monday. He said that investigators were poring through “a lot of social media” and working to verify whether accounts belonged to the suspect.

“Every digital footprint is being looked at,” he said. “Some of that takes warrants that have to be served on various social media platforms.”

The logs, which were reported on by The Washington Post, offer a detailed rundown of months spent gathering gear, several trips to a gun store to inspect the assault rifle that the writer said he ultimately purchased, and even a visit to the Tops grocery store to map out the planned assault in March.

A few posts include crude drawings of the grocery store’s layout, including a possible route to follow during the shooting.

Scattered among the messages were musings about daily life, logging what the writer had eaten that day, fluctuations in his weight and his interactions with people.

He describes conversations with people at a flea market and at stores where he sold silver items, writing that he told them he needed money for college.

He wrote that he chased down a cat who attacked his own cat, Paige, in his garage and stabbed it repeatedly with a knife. He eventually decapitated it with a hatchet, he said, and buried it in the backyard, but not before taking a picture.

About two months before the shooting, on March 9, Mr. Gendron described having driven to Buffalo and gone inside Tops to plan the attack. He said he had noted where he planned to “gear up” and park and had made a map of the inside of the store, tallying the number of white and Black customers he saw there.

At about 4 p.m., as he was leaving Tops, an armed security guard confronted him, he wrote.

“I’ve seen you go in and out,” he wrote that the security guard said. “What are you doing?”

He responded that he was “collecting consensus data,” and the guard told him to speak to a manager. He wrote that he asked for the guard’s name and then said “bye and thanks,” before walking back to his car.

“In hindsight that was a close call,” he wrote.

Discord is a messaging application popular with gamers that gained mainstream appeal during the height of the pandemic, as young people trapped at home downloaded it to message and hold audio calls with others.

Its layout is similar to the workplace tool Slack, in that it is split into a series of chat rooms known as servers. Some are large and public, with thousands of members, while others are private and invitation-only, with rules and content moderation decisions left largely up to the whims of the server’s creator.

Discord has taken steps to improve its content moderation in recent years, especially after white supremacists used the site to plan the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. But it still relies heavily on user reports of misconduct.

Troy Closson, Jennie Coughlin and John Herrman contributed reporting.

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Audra D. S. BurchLuke Vander Ploeg
May 16, 2022, 6:52 p.m. ET

Buffalo shooting highlights rise of hate crimes against Black Americans.

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Christopher Glenn, 42, praying at Macedonia Baptist Church in Buffalo for the families of the slain victims of the Tops supermarket shooting.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

Follow our live coverage of the Buffalo mass shooting.

The racist slaughter at a Buffalo grocery store on Saturday is the latest episode in a troubling rise of violence against African Americans, built upon historic racial fault lines and a polarized social climate.

In 2020, a year marked by the triple forces of the coronavirus pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and a social justice movement protesting police violence and racism, the F.B.I. reported a surge in hate crimes targeting African Americans.

About 64.9 percent of the 8,052 reported hate crime incidents that year were based on race, ethnicity or ancestry bias, according to the F.B.I. Within that category, Black Americans made up more than half of the victims.

The number of reported hate crimes against African Americans in 2020 was 2,871, up from 1,972 in 2019. That spike drove a nearly 9.1 percent increase in hate crimes overall. In the five years before 2019, African Americans were victims in about half of all the race, ethnicity or ancestry bias cases, according to F.B.I. data.

Experts who track data caution that federal numbers are incomplete, and that some of that spike might be the result of increased awareness and more willingness to report such crimes. Yet they say the attention to social justice might itself have spurred more violence targeting Black Americans.

“The year 2020 changed the trajectory of prejudice in some ways to refocus on American Blacks, in part because of the social justice protests following the murder of George Floyd,” said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

While national hate crime statistics for 2021 have not yet been released, hate crime experts say the assault on Black Americans and institutions has continued: About a third of the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities were targeted with bomb threats this year, along with more than a dozen houses of worship and other faith-based and academic institutions, according to the F.B.I.

Racially motivated violence took center stage again in February when three white Georgia men were convicted of federal hate crimes for chasing down and killing Ahmaud Arbery because he was African American. The trial stood out for its unvarnished examination of racism.

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Cariol Horne, second from left, led a march around the Buffalo neighborhood where the shooting occurred. The suspect expressed a deeply rooted white supremacist ideology.Credit...Malik Rainey for The New York Times

The F.B.I. releases a report of hate crimes annually, but the federal tracking system does not require police agencies to submit data, and a significant number of victims may not report bias crimes to the police. The underreporting creates an imprecise portrait of the scale of hate crimes nationally, but the report still offers a useful snapshot of broad trends. In recent years, the Justice Department has encouraged victims to report bias and made prosecuting the crimes a priority.

The F.B.I. report released last year, based on data collected in 2020 from more than 15,000 law enforcement agencies, showed the highest spike in hate crimes in a dozen years, numbers driven largely by increases in incidents against Black and Asian Americans.

The F.B.I. defines a hate crime as a crime against a person or property motivated by bias. That can include everything from bomb threats and vandalism to physical violence and murder.

The federal data shows that in the past decade, hate crimes against Black Americans, who make up 12.1 percent of the population, have far exceeded those reported against any other group, including biases based on a victim’s religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation.

According to the data, 20,084 instances of anti-Black crimes were reported over the past decade. The next largest category in that time period, anti-Jewish crimes, included 7,688 reports — though the Jewish population is only about 2.4 percent of the U.S. adult population, according to Pew Research Center.

The man accused of the attack in Buffalo, a white 18-year-old armed with a semiautomatic rifle and a white supremacist ideology embraced during the idle hours of the pandemic, opened fire at a supermarket in a mostly Black neighborhood several hours away from where he lived.

The authorities say he killed 10 people and injured three others, almost all of them African American. In a screed the suspect posted online detailing his plans, he made clear they were driven by hate, scrawling a racist slur on his weapon and referring to replacement theory, a far-right belief that the white population is at risk of being replaced by people of color and immigrants.

The mass shooting, which the Justice Department is investigating as a potential hate crime, parallels other racial violence born from white supremacy, such as the massacres in a Black church in Charleston, S.C., a Pittsburgh synagogue and a Walmart in El Paso where the shooting suspect complained of Hispanic “invasion.”

The contemporary universe of hate crimes against African Americans is a combination of old and new strains of bigotry, those who study it say. It includes the enduring fear of demographic shifts and “replacement” brewing in pockets of the internet and often stoked by racist political rhetoric.

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Praying on the spot where Ahmaud Arbery was killed in Georgia in 2020. Three white men were convicted of federal hate crimes for chasing down and killing Mr. Arbery because he was African American.Credit...Dustin Chambers for The New York Times

“It’s an old theme in white supremacists dating back decades, many decades,” said Jeannine Bell, a professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law and an expert on hate crimes.

“They’ve long been worried about white replacement,” she said. “And I imagine when times get tough as they are now, there are more worries about it.”

Dr. Bell also attributed the recent rise in anti-Black hate crimes in part to a backlash against the protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

“Those protests brought out a lot of anger about African Americans. A lot of support, but also a lot of anger,” she said. “Black victimization was in the news. And if it’s anything that angers white supremacists, it’s seeing African Americans being seen sympathetically.”

Dr. Bell said it was not easy to trace the source of an increase in hate crimes. But major events like the protests in the summer of 2020 provide a helpful touchstone.

“It’s easy to say that there’s probably been an increase in anti-Asian hate crimes,” Dr. Bell said. “What happened? There was an event, a pandemic, and large numbers of anti-Asian hate crimes associated with the pandemic started happening.”

Hate crimes against African Americans are particularly difficult to count accurately, Dr. Bell said, because of a lack of groups dedicated to specifically tracking such crimes.

On Sunday, a group of national civil rights and social justice organizations called on President Biden to convene a summit this week to address hate crimes and right-wing extremism.

The Rev. Al Sharpton said on Twitter that he had spoken to two members of Mr. Biden’s cabinet and stressed the need for a summit: “This needs a National response to rising crimes immediately.”

Emily Cochrane
May 16, 2022, 6:36 p.m. ET

Schumer accuses Fox and Carlson for amplifying replacement theory, and ‘MAGA’ Republicans of winking at it.

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Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, last week in the Capitol.Credit...Shuran Huang for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, on Monday castigated hard-right Republicans, along with Fox News and pundit Tucker Carlson, for espousing and amplifying themes that are at the heart of the white supremacist “replacement theory” that motivated the mass shooter who killed 10 Black people in a Buffalo supermarket.

In a speech on the Senate floor, Mr. Schumer said the racist theory, which claims that elites want to “replace” white Americans with immigrants and people of color, had until recently “only found in the darkest places in deranged minds.”

“But unfortunately, with each passing year, it seems harder and harder to ignore that the replacement theory and other racially-motivated views are increasingly coming out into the open, and given purported legitimacy by some MAGA Republicans and cable news pundits,” Mr. Schumer said. “The message is not always explicit, but we’ve all seen the pattern.”

Citing a New York Times investigation into the rhetoric Mr. Carlson often highlights on his show, Mr. Schumer accused Fox News of providing a powerful platform for the extremist and racist views.

“In a craven quest for viewers and ratings, organizations like Fox News have spent years perfecting the craft of stoking cultural grievance and political resentment that eerily mirrors the messages found in replacement theory,” he said. Mr. Schumer added, “These views should have no place in American society and certainly no place in the segments of our most-watched news channels.”

And he said that Republicans who have trafficked in racist and xenophobic statements, such as calling undocumented immigrants “invaders” or asserting falsely that millions of them have voted in an effort to displace native-born voters, have contributed to the spread of what he called “a dangerous and a deeply anti-American worldview.”

“The subtext is clear,” Mr. Schumer said. “These hard-right MAGA Republicans argue that people of color and minority communities are somehow posing a threat — a threat — to the American way of life. This is replacement theory in a nutshell.”

The senator is expected to travel to Buffalo on Tuesday with President Biden and Jill Biden, the first lady, to meet with the families of the victims, law enforcement and local officials.

Mr. Carlson condemned the Buffalo shooting on his show Monday night, but he quickly pivoted to an attack on Democratic leaders who, in his estimation, used the tragedy as “a pretext” to “blame those murders on their political opponents.” The Fox News host acknowledged that the gunman’s letter was “definitely racist, bitterly so,” but he said it was “not quite right” to describe it as a “racist manifesto.” Mr. Carlson asserted that the document was “not really political at all,” but rather “a rambling pastiche of slogans and internet memes” written by a mentally ill individual.

Mr. Carlson’s highest moral dudgeon was reserved not for the gunman but for Democrats. He evoked a common theme of his program, that liberals were working to strip his Fox News viewers of their rights. “So because a mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud,” Mr. Carlson told his audience. “That’s what they’re telling you. That’s what they’ve wanted to tell you for a long time.”

Michael M. Grynbaum contributed reporting.

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Lola Fadulu
May 16, 2022, 6:12 p.m. ET

Students of all backgrounds across Buffalo discussed the mass shooting in their classrooms on Monday morning. William Gibbons, who is 11 years old and white, said he learned during school on Monday that one of the school's teacher aides lost a family member in the mass shooting.

“Everyone was in a tense mood, so they gave everyone 20 minutes to talk about it,” William, who is in the fifth grade at City Honors, said.

William said he learned in school that 8 of the 10 people who died had worked on the Freedom Wall, an art exhibition part of Albright-Knox Art Museum. “They were just like a bunch of innocent people who didn't deserve to die.”

Jason Silverstein
May 16, 2022, 5:54 p.m. ET

I talked to people at a food pantry set up in a parking lot down the street from the Tops supermarket in Buffalo. In the pouring rain, people spent hours handing out food to other members of their community, which is in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Many residents said the area is a food desert, with the Tops being the only option for groceries. I asked them what changes they want to see after the shooting. Some shared some hopes for what could happen, but several pointed out that nothing can change the color of their skin, which could make them innocent targets for racist attacks like the one on Saturday.

Michael Wilson
May 16, 2022, 5:47 p.m. ET

They were at Tops when the shooting started. This is how they survived.

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The Tops supermarket was a hub in a largely Black section of Buffalo. That fact made it the target of a racist gunman.Credit...Robert Bumsted/Associated Press

BUFFALO — On weekends, the employees at the Tops Friendly Market in East Buffalo tend to be younger, the ones unable to work weekdays, often because of school. Cashiers, shopping-cart attendants, shelf stockers — their manager, Lorraine Baker, 57, calls them “my babies.” One of them, Nia Brown, 20, was just back to work on Saturday after having had her own baby seven weeks earlier, a daughter named Aniyah.

Ms. Baker said goodbye after her shift on Saturday afternoon and walked out of Tops. The store hires heavily from the surrounding neighborhood, and if the employees weren’t her actual babies, they might still be family: In the parking lot as Ms. Baker left, her cousin, Zaire Goodman, 20, was collecting carts.

At around 2:30 p.m., he was helping a woman with her groceries when a blue car pulled up. The driver’s door opened, and a nightmare stepped out, covered from head to toe in tactical gear and carrying an assault rifle.

Much has been discovered and will be learned in the weeks ahead about the massacre and the man who the authorities say perpetrated it. But this is a story about the men and women who were at work that day at an uncommonly beloved supermarket — one that functions like a family — and what they did when that place became the scene of a massacre.

Jermaine Saffold, 38, was just pulling into a parking spot nearby to duck into Family Dollar next door for a birthday present for his young son. He heard gunshots and saw a man crouch-walking toward the store. He jumped back in his car, shouting, “He’s shooting! He’s shooting!”

Mr. Goodman, in the parking lot, saw the older woman he was helping fall, struck, just as a round pierced the right side of his own neck. He dropped and froze, both playing dead and wanting to help the woman if he could.

Nearby, two other people fell almost simultaneously. The gunman approached the sliding doors of Tops and entered.

The store opened 19 years ago and became a neighborhood hub and gathering place in what had been a food desert. Regular customers greeted workers by name, and employees were known to hang out after their shift, catching up with friends.

This very community is what drew the gunman. An avowed racist, he selected this Tops after researching predominantly Black ZIP codes and drove hundreds of miles here from his nearly all-white hometown.

By the time Saturday arrived, the man knew the store — where the security officer usually stood, where the cameras had blind spots. He’d drawn a map of the interior and plotted his assault through the aisles. He’d been inside before, according to people who remembered noticing him, the white stranger. Ashley Marks, a cashier who likes to joke with customers, was sure she rang up his two Red Bulls days earlier.

On Saturday morning, he walked inside and fired, over and over. He shot women old enough to be his grandmother. Ms. Brown, the cashier with the new baby, was helping customers in the self-checkout lanes when the shooting began, and she dove between two taller cash registers. Beside her, a new manager named Chris took a bullet in the knee.

Chris quietly urged Ms. Brown to stop crying so she wouldn’t draw attention. She didn’t even realize he’d been hit.

She froze. She’d never heard gunfire before. She thought about the baby at home.

In those moments in the store, a tight and cheerful network of co-workers who were friends, neighbors and family shattered into isolated individuals making split-second decisions. Some tried to help; others were alone; everyone was trapped.

Barry McQuiller, a 31-year-old man who stocks shelves, was just walking back into the store from a break room when he realized he’d forgotten his juice, and he turned to grab it when the shooting began. That may have saved his life. He bolted for a nearby back door to his car. Sidney Grasty, 32, a produce worker, was also in a break room and ran to a restroom and locked the door.

Latisha Rogers, 33, was standing behind the customer service counter when she heard the first shots. Too far from an exit, she ducked down behind the counter and pulled out her cellphone. She called 911 and, afraid of revealing herself, whispered softly to the dispatcher: There’s someone shooting in the store.

I can’t hear you, the dispatcher told her. Why are you whispering?

Their connection broke. Afraid the dispatcher might call back, Ms. Rogers switched her phone to silent mode. But then the office landline above started ringing. Standing up and answering it could mean getting shot, so she stayed down and let it ring. She was terrified that whoever was shooting would come for a closer look.

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A memorial to the victims who were killed at the store grew nearby in the days that followed.Credit...Malik Rainey for The New York Times

Jerome Bridges, 45, a scan coordinator checking bar codes in the dairy section, was in Aisle 14. The sounds of gunfire were coming closer, and, thinking quickly, Mr. Bridges made it to a conference room. Others were already there. Mr. Bridges pushed a table against the doors as a barricade, then fortified that with a filing cabinet.

Long minutes passed this way as the death toll rose: the 86-year-old mother of a former city fire commissioner, a 77-year-old woman who ran a food pantry, the 55-year-old security guard who would be hailed as a hero for returning fire.

Outside the store, three victims were dead, and one was bleeding from a shot to the neck — Zaire Goodman, the cart worker. In the frantic minutes after he fell, another worker found him, helped him to his feet and fast-walked him across the street. The woman he had been helping was one of the dead. Inside Tops, those who had found shelter froze in place — in the bathroom, behind a register, beneath the customer service counter.

The shooting stopped. The next sound Ms. Rogers heard beneath the counter was the squawk of a police radio. She slowly stood, hands in the air, and saw a police officer. She asked, “Can I get out?”

Ms. Brown, the young mother behind the register, looked up to see an officer. She and others would soon learn what had happened: The gunman, who had written that his plan was to drive around the neighborhood, shooting more Black people and possibly striking a second store, had emerged from Tops and, confronted by the police, raised the barrel of his rifle to his chin before officers tackled him. The Erie County sheriff, John Garcia, would later refuse to speak his name at a news briefing: “As far as we’re concerned, he’s Inmate Control Number 157103.”

Soon after the gunfire stopped, another aspect of the plot became clear: The gunman had worn a camera mounted on his helmet, livestreaming the carnage. Despite efforts to remove the video from the internet, it was viewed millions of times — including, surprisingly, by employees at Tops.

Workers who had been inside the store and others who were off on Saturday watched the video after the fact, finding a measure of comfort, even pride: It was a document of a horror they had survived.

Zachary Johnson, 19, who was trained to collect carts by Zaire Goodman, watched the aftermath of the attack on Facebook Live. “That’s my man Zaire!” he shouted. Ms. Brown, standing with co-workers outside Tops a day after the shooting, watched the helmet camera video with her daughter asleep in her arms. She realized the gunman had come one register away from where she had been hiding.

Jihad Green, 26, had been fresh out of jail for forgery and larceny two years ago when a Tops manager hired him — “They gave me an opportunity.” He has since left the store, but returned on Sunday, tearfully embracing that same manager.

That same day-after, Mr. Bridges, the scan coordinator who had barricaded the conference room, walked past the back doors from which he and others had made their escape. It was blocked off with police tape like the rest of the store.

“I don’t know if I can go back,” he said.

He was not alone. Mr. Goodman was treated for his neck wound, which had narrowly missed major arteries, and was released from a hospital Saturday evening. His mother, Zeneta Everhart, said the next day that he would not be returning to Tops either.

“We’re counting our blessings today,” she said.

And Ms. Marks, the joking cashier, said she could not imagine standing in that post with her back to the front door ever again. The new manager, who is white, had been shot in the knee while working at her register. Ms. Marks, who is Black, said she couldn’t help but think that had she been in that spot, she would have been murdered for one simple reason:

“Because of the color of my skin.”

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Ali Watkins
May 16, 2022, 4:59 p.m. ET

The mass shooting in Buffalo is the third at a grocery store in recent years.

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A mass shooting at King Soopers in Boulder, Colo., in 2021, killed 10.Credit...Eliza Earle for The New York Times

Underscoring a troubling trend, the Buffalo shooting is the third mass shooting in three years that occurred in a grocery store hand-selected by the gunmen who targeted them.

The shooting at the Tops market in Buffalo comes just a year after a gunman in Boulder, Colo., opened fire at a busy King Soopers grocery store, killing 10. Before that, in August 2019, a gunman fueled by anti-immigrant hatred targeted an El Paso Walmart, killing 23.

“The feelings never go away, this New York tragedy just reminds us of how exactly we felt in the exact same moment we had to live through it,” said Jacklin Luna, who lost her great uncle at the shooting in El Paso. “These hateful shooters don’t know the amount of pain, grief, heartache and trauma they cause when they choose to do these selfish acts.”

In security parlance, grocery stores are ubiquitous “soft targets”: largely unsecured, brick-and-mortar spaces that are open to the public, with few measures governing who can enter and move about.

For those who have lived through a mass shooting, Saturday’s tragedy was an uncomfortable interruption in an already difficult healing process. That the shooting occurred in yet another grocery store underscored for many how an ostensibly safe neighborhood institution could be ravaged in seconds.

“Fourteen months later, and the Boulder shooting is still something that persists in my mind everyday,” said Maggie Montoya, 27, who survived the mass shooting at King Soopers in Boulder last year. “Just as I’m feeling better and trying to feel safer in public settings, I’m reminded that we can never be sure when and where something like this will happen again.”

Christine Chung contributed reporting.

A correction was made on 
May 16, 2022

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of people who were killed in the shooting in El Paso. It was 23 not 20.

How we handle corrections

Troy Closson
May 16, 2022, 4:42 p.m. ET

The Buffalo mayor, Byron W. Brown, said that children and teenagers on the city’s East Side in particular have been reeling from the “the pain of this attack and the sting of racism.”

“I talked to one woman today and she said her son was messed up,” he said. “This has really affected young people in the community.”

Troy Closson
May 16, 2022, 4:33 p.m. ET

Local officials said on Monday that the medical examiner’s office in Erie County expects to complete autopsies of the 10 people who were killed in the shooting by the end of Wednesday.

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Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

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Troy Closson
May 16, 2022, 4:28 p.m. ET

John C. Garcia, the Erie County sheriff, said that the suspect in the Buffalo shooting “continues to be on suicide watch,” and separated from the general prison population.

Troy Closson
May 16, 2022, 4:26 p.m. ET

At a news conference in Buffalo on Monday, officials didn't give a timeline for when the investigation of the Tops grocery store shooting would be completed — and when police tape blocking off the area would taken down — but stressed they would move as quickly as possible.

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Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
Emily Cochrane
May 16, 2022, 4:23 p.m. ET

“We must still reckon with unspeakable acts of racial violence like what happened Saturday,” Schumer said, adding that the gunman had been motivated by “a dangerous ideology known as the great replacement theory.”

Ashley Southall
May 16, 2022, 4:19 p.m. ET

State troopers who investigated Payton Gendron after he made remarks about wanting to carry out a murder-suicide last June did not seek a protective order that would have allowed them to seize his guns, a state police spokesman said.

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Emily Cochrane
May 16, 2022, 4:18 p.m. ET

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said he would travel to Buffalo on Tuesday with President Biden and Jill Biden, the first lady, to express condolences to the community.

May 16, 2022, 2:55 p.m. ET

How guns are taken away under New York’s ‘red flag’ law.

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FBI agents stand outside the supermarket in Buffalo where a racist attack occurred Saturday. Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

Follow our live coverage of the Buffalo mass shooting.

Since New York’s so-called red flag law took effect in 2019, judges have issued 589 orders barring people from possessing firearms because they pose a danger to themselves or others, according to the State Office of Court Administration.

About 18 orders to take guns away from people are issued per month under the law, which allows relatives and law enforcement or school officials to request what is known formally as an extreme risk protection order.

The process involves filing an application with the state court system at the county level, stating that a person “is likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others” as defined in part 9.39 of State Mental Hygiene Law.

The law, one of 19 of its type across the United States, defines “a substantial risk of physical harm” to others as one “manifested by homicidal or other violent behavior by which others are placed in reasonable fear of serious physical harm.”

Since Saturday’s racist attack that killed 10 people in Buffalo, questions have been raised about why the law was not invoked against the suspect, Payton S. Gendron. Last spring, in a high school project that asked students about their plans, Mr. Gendron responded that his was to commit a murder-suicide, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the matter.

Though Mr. Gendron later said he was joking, a vice principal reported the remark, the official said. In response, according to the state police, Mr. Gendron was taken to a hospital for a mental health evaluation. He was released within a couple of days, the police said, declining to provide details of the evaluation.

The state police said Monday that they did not seek a red flag order against Mr. Gendron. They did not say why, but mentioned over the weekend that he had not named a specific murder target.

“We passed the law specifically to ensure that people who exhibit signs of being dangerous to themselves or others can be denied access to guns,” said State Senator Brian Kavanagh, a Democrat who represents parts of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn and who sponsored the bill. “There’s a real question about whether that law was effectively applied when this person was apparently detained after making threats.”

“It’s important that we understand what happened there and that every county in the state is implementing the red flag law that we passed,” he added.

Someone applying for a red flag order must state “specific facts and circumstances” that justify it. The application form also includes check-boxes for categories of concerning behavior, including threats or use of physical force, violation of an existing order of protection, reckless use or brandishing of a gun and substance abuse. It also includes space to list the firearms owned by the person who is the subject of the application.

After an application is filed, a judge holds a hearing at which both sides can be heard. If a judge grants the order, the person who is the subject of the order must surrender all guns and may not buy others for as long as a year. The order can be renewed upon a showing that the person “continues to be likely to engage” in dangerous conduct.

In Mr. Gendron’s home county, Broome, there have been 11 red flag orders, or about one for every 18,000 residents. The court system does not track the number of applications that were denied.

The law enforcement official who had been briefed on the school project said that in New York, hundreds of school threats are called in each year, and that in each case, authorities interview students and parents to determine whether students have access to guns. The authorities then try to make a reasoned call on what action to take.

The suspect wrote in a document he posted online that he obtained a shotgun and a bolt-action rifle in 2020. Sometime in the past few months, he bought the Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle that police say he used in the shooting at a store in Endicott, N.Y., 20 miles from his home in Conklin, according to the owner.

Nineteen states have enacted such laws, including Virginia and New Mexico as recently as 2020. Because almost all have been enacted within the past 10 years, there is limited research on their effectiveness.

Josh Horwitz, co-director of the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said that the laws could be effective when law enforcement bodies were properly trained and there was funding behind such programs.

Mr. Horwitz, who campaigns on behalf of red flag laws, pointed to King County, Washington, where the district attorney has a team that helps residents and law enforcement officials file such orders, and helps ensure that guns are removed when the orders are approved by a judge.

Mr. Horwitz said that the Buffalo attack indicated a need to reassess how the measure was understood by law enforcement authorities.

“New York is a big state, and there is an opportunity for a more systemic type of implementation,” he said.

Michael Levenson
May 16, 2022, 2:30 p.m. ET

A father buying his 3-year-old son’s birthday cake was among the victims.

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A street memorial in Buffalo was set up following a racist attack at a Tops supermarket.Credit...Malik Rainey for The New York Times

The last time Tracey Maciulewicz spoke to her fiancé, Andre Mackniel, he was headed to the Tops grocery store for a birthday cake, chips and soda for their 3-year-old son.

The boy was so close to Mr. Mackniel, 53, that “they went everywhere together,” Ms. Maciulewicz said on Monday. “He would just follow him around like his shadow.”

The family lived in Auburn, outside Syracuse, and had traveled about two hours to Buffalo, where Mr. Mackniel grew up, to celebrate the boy’s birthday at a relative’s house.

“I asked him to buy everything beforehand, but he wanted to go the day of,” Ms. Maciulewicz said. It was supposed to just be a quick trip to Tops.

Before going into the store, “He told me he loved me,” she said, and he added, “I’ll be back.”

But Mr. Mackniel never made it out of the store. He was among the 10 people killed by a gunman in what the authorities said was a racist attack.

“It’s completely unfair that racism is still present in 2022, and it’s not OK that my son, who is half white and half Black, has to grow up without a father, and has to be afraid to go into a store without knowing if something is going to happen,” Ms. Maciulewicz said.

Ms. Maciulewicz and Mr. Mackniel met online six years ago and got engaged in September. Mr. Mackniel, she said, had six children, a large extended family and was a devoted fan of the Miami Heat.

“He was a loving father,” she said. “He was so genuine and so sweet and so kind — like no kind of person I’ve ever met before.”

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Shaila Dewan
May 16, 2022, 2:10 p.m. ET

In a weekend of violence, gunfire shakes communities beyond Buffalo.

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Police officers cordoned off the scene in Laguna Woods, Calif., where a gunman opened fire at a church banquet for a Taiwanese American congregation on Sunday.Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times

It wasn’t only a supermarket in Buffalo. Across the country, gunfire erupted over the weekend at a church banquet for a Taiwanese American congregation in Laguna Woods, Calif.; near a nightlife district after an N.B.A. playoff game in Milwaukee, Wis.; at a busy flea market in Houston; and at the renowned Millennium Park in Chicago.

On average, 321 people are shot in the United States each day, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

The shootings over the weekend were not all similar: Some were perpetrated by lone gunmen, at others the police arrested multiple suspects. In Millennium Park, a 17-year-old was charged in the death on Saturday of a 16-year-old. In Columbus, Ohio, an 8-year-old girl was shot as two groups of women fought in a public park; the police arrested a man who claimed he had been firing a warning shot, The Columbus Dispatch reported.

In Milwaukee on Friday night, at least three separate shootings occurred near the site of the basketball game, including one in which 17 people were injured, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. At the Houston flea market, two people were killed, three were wounded and two people were arrested on Sunday afternoon, The Houston Chronicle said. The market stayed open for business.

In Laguna Woods, congregants at Geneva Presbyterian were honoring a former pastor on Sunday when a gunman opened fire inside the church, killing one person and wounding five others. Congregants overpowered the gunman and hogtied him, the authorities said. They have not speculated as to the motive.

Jason Silverstein
May 16, 2022, 1:56 p.m. ET

Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said that in addition to gun control measures, he wanted to see hate speech on social media “reined in” after the attack, citing the alleged gunman’s online manifesto.

“People being able to indoctrinate people in hate and hateful thoughts and white supremacy on the internet — the fact that that material can be put on the internet and spread is problematic, it should come to an end, it shouldn’t be allowed to happen,” he told The New York Times after a news conference.

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Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
Ashley Wong
May 16, 2022, 1:48 p.m. ET

Katherine Massey, one of the victims, wrote passionate letters to newspapers calling for gun control.

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Katherine Massey, who was killed in the mass shooting at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, wrote passionately about gun violence and a range of other topics.Credit...Robert Kirkham/The Buffalo News, via Associated Press

Years before Katherine Massey, 72, was killed in Saturday’s mass shooting in Buffalo, she wrote several commanding letters in local Buffalo publications urging stronger gun control laws.

Her most recent letter was published almost exactly one year ago in The Buffalo News. In the letter, which she wrote in response to news of another shooting in Buffalo that killed a local legislator’s cousin, Ms. Massey denounced the city’s “escalating gun violence” and called for crackdowns on illegal out-of-state gun trafficking.

“There needs to be extensive federal action/legislation to address all aspects of the issue,” she wrote. “Current pursued remedies mainly inspired by mass killings — namely, universal background checks and banning assault weapons — essentially exclude the sources of our city’s gun problems.”

These letters exemplified who Ms. Massey was, said Betty Jean Grant, a longtime friend and fellow community advocate. Ms. Grant described Ms. Massey as fearless, strong-willed and someone who was deeply connected to Buffalo’s East Side.

“She was in love with the community,” Ms. Grant said. “And she loved Black people. And she would fight for anybody, without a doubt.”

The pair first met more than 20 years ago, when Ms. Grant was working at Buffalo City Hall and Ms. Massey was the president of her local block club.

Since then, Ms. Grant said, they had worked together on countless community projects, including an effort to improve relationships between Black residents and the Buffalo police.

Ms. Massey addressed that very issue in another letter, published in August 2018 in The Challenger News, where she called on the Buffalo Police Department to hire more Black officers who would have a better understanding of the community.

She argued that this would increase trust among residents, who would then be more likely to report illegal firearms.

“It’s inconceivable major illegal gun dealers are elusive and figuratively Teflon-coated, in a country that has GPS which can track a gnat and satellites capable of listening to someone’s whisper from outer space,” she wrote.

Ms. Massey wrote many letters to the editor over the years, writing to support or criticize policies and commenting on a range of local issues.

She praised a monument commemorating Black veterans, condemned the closure of a longstanding theater in the city center, and wrote passionately about school district affairs and developing the city’s business district.

In one letter to The Buffalo News, Ms. Massey praised her local public access TV station for broadcasting “Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case,” an adaptation of the classic Agatha Christie mystery. She said that her appreciation rose “to the ionosphere” after learning that the station was one of the few in North America to air it.

“For some moments, I sat affected by the touching, unpredicted series finale delivered via the masterful actor, David Suchet,” she wrote. “Western New York and Canada are very fortunate to have the quality offerings provided by this public television station.”

Ms. Grant said that she suggested to the family and a Buffalo City Council member that the city rename the street Ms. Massey grew up on Kat Massey Lane.

She said she would miss nursing cups of ginger ale with her friend, talking about all the ways the city of Buffalo could better serve its residents. And she said she was most proud of her for fighting right to the end to hold local leaders accountable.

“Her mission was to make sure that she improved our community, our city, with the resources she had,” she said.

“It personified what she and I believe — that women can fight, too.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

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