Officially, the FBI is describing Saturday’s shooting at a supermarket in the American city of Buffalo as a “hate crime” — a mass murder motivated by a white man’s hatred of black people. However, the massacre could also be called something else: right-wing extremist, racist terrorism. The assassination, which is believed to have been carried out by 18-year-old Payton G. over the weekend, and which killed ten people, was planned and prepared, it hit defenseless people who were doing their weekend shopping and who were only targeted because of the color of their skin.
In addition, according to the police authorities, the attack probably had a political background: the shooter not only broadcast his act live on the Internet, he had apparently previously published a kind of manifesto on the Internet in which he described himself as right-wing extremist, racist and anti-Semitic. In the document, he justified the attack by saying that whites had to defend themselves against the so-called “Great Replacement”.
This term is the core of a theory widespread in right-wing circles, according to which left-wing, cosmopolitan elites want to “replace” the white population in North America and Europe with blacks or immigrants from the South. In Germany, supporters of this theory use terms such as “Umvolkung”. In the USA, the theory finds approval well into the normal conservative camp.
He shot in the supermarket aisles. systematic. Almost all victims are black
G., who had not previously been noticed by the police, put his act in a row with other similar attacks that right-wing terrorists had carried out in recent years – the attack on black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, the shooting in one synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, the massacre at a Walmart supermarket in El Paso, Texas, in which a white gunman killed mostly Hispanics in 2019, and the attack by a right-wing gunman on a mosque in the New Zealand city of Christchurch in the same year. In many of these cases, parts of the same ideas were found in the world views of the attackers, which apparently also motivated G. to commit his crime.
Another circumstance points to a targeted, racist background: G. drove a good 200 miles to get from his home in Conklin in southern New York State to the site of the attack. Apparently he had deliberately chosen a residential area in Buffalo in which the majority of black people live. There he attacked a supermarket that was mostly frequented by African Americans – at the main shopping time, around 2:30 p.m. on Saturday afternoon. G. wore military camouflage clothing and a bulletproof vest. This apparently caught at least one bullet that a security guard in the supermarket fired at him, the perpetrator shot him too.
According to eyewitnesses, G. opened fire in the parking lot in front of the supermarket and killed his first victims there. After that, he walked between the shelves inside and systematically murdered people. The number of victims and their skin color clearly reflects the motives of the perpetrator: ten dead, three wounded – and eleven of the people who were hit by the bullets were black. That Assassination attempt in Buffalo will go down as one of the most serious acts of racist terror in recent US history.
After the crime, G. was arrested and did not seek a confrontation with the police. In addition to the judicial authorities of the state of New York, where Buffalo is located, the US federal authorities are also investigating the teenager. So far he has been charged with first degree murder and if convicted he would face imprisonment for the rest of his life.