Mourning and learning
Today we grieve for lives lost and indelibly harmed in Saturday’s shooting rampage in Buffalo. We should also understand that it represents a conflagration of two of America’s most noxious poisons: a culture that celebrates the never-ending supply of deadly firearms, and metastasizing white supremacist hate.
This killer purchased his AR-15 rifle — the “civilian” version of the M4 carbines we’re shipping to Ukraine for use in a bloody land war — legally in his hometown of Broome County. It’s not clear whether he did so before or after he was investigated for making shooting threats against a local high school last June.
A so-called red flag law, enacted by the state in 2019, is intended precisely to prevent individuals who might pose a danger to themselves and others from possessing firearms, either by stopping purchases or taking away existing guns. There is hardly a more self-evidently dangerous individual than one who makes terroristic threats against a school, let alone less than one year before going on a hate-fueled rampage.
How then could he have this weapon of war? How did he come to possess an extended capacity magazine that is illegal in New York? Where did he get the body armor that saved him when he was shot by a guard, who became one of his victims? We must probe whether this was a problem of law or of action. And we must hope that the Supreme Court doesn’t take a chunk out of our existing gun restrictions this year.
These tools alone did not kill those people. They were wielded by a teenager whose mind was poisoned by an abhorrent ideology that has inched ever closer from the fringe to open discussion in mainstream political and media circles. Some language in his rambling manifesto posted online is virtually indistinguishable from the ramblings of certain primetime cable news hosts who’ve despicably insinuated that the nation’s white population is being intentionally replaced by other ethnicities. This might be a ratings game to them, but it wasn’t to this shooter. Words have consequences.