Christchurch horror inspired US shooter
The teenager charged with shooting dead 10 African-Americans at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, was inspired by the insidious racist creed used by Christchurch’s mass killer Brenton Tarrant, which claims that minorities are taking over society.
The 18-year-old suspect, Payton Gendron, took inspiration from Tarrant, the Australian white supremacist who murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.
Tarrant had warned in a manifesto of a “Great Replacement” of white Christians of European descent by Blacks, Jews, Muslims, Latinos and others.
Lifting often word-forword from the rambling text, Gendron produced a chilling 180-page manifesto of his own – in which he stated his goal was to “kill as many blacks as possible”. Gendron himself came from a rural town in New York state that has a very small number of nonwhite residents. Its population of 5000, according to the 2020 census, was 96 per cent white and just 0.6 per cent African-American.
He learnt his hate almost exclusively online, a pattern of “radicalisation” that law enforcement authorities say has surged recently to become a major threat for the US.
Gendron drove 320km to Buffalo to carry out his attack in a neighbourhood he knew had a large African-American population, during the busiest shopping period of the week.
Police said that last year, before graduating, Gendron had said he was planning to undertake a murder-suicide.
He was given a psychiatric assessment, but was released.