On Saturday, 18-year-old Payton Gendron opened fire at a Tops Friendly Markets in the predominantly black Kingsley neighborhood of Buffalo, New York. Over the course of his ten-minute rampage, Gendron murdered ten people and injured another three; he livestreamed the massacre on the platform Twitch. The horrific incident is being investigated as a hate crime, owing in part to a manifesto in which Gendron allegedly justifies the attack as a defense of the white majority against “replacement” by blacks and Jews.
The shooting has already been absorbed into the culture war. Commentators on the left have been quick to argue that the Buffalo massacre is simply more evidence of white supremacy’s grip on the Republican Party, and on American society as a whole. Some on the right mutter about the manifesto’s stranger sections, insinuating that the whole thing is some sort of FBI conspiracy. These efforts misappropriate, or wholly obscure, the bare meaning of these murders. Our response to the Buffalo mass shooting should be that a monster committed a heinous and indefensible act, and that justice demands we hold him to final account. Try him, convict him, and put him to death.
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