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White Nationalist Murders Ten In Shooting At Buffalo Grocery Store

White Nationalist Murders Ten In Shooting At Buffalo Grocery Store

By Steve Gorman and Moira Warburton

(Reuters) -An 18-year-old white gunman shot 10 people to death and wounded three others at a grocery store in a Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, before surrendering to authorities, who called it a hate crime and an act of "racially motivated violent extremism."

Authorities said the suspect, who was armed with an assault-style rifle and appeared to have acted alone, drove to Buffalo from his home in a New York county "hours away" to target the store in an attack he broadcast on the internet. Eleven of the 13 people struck by gunfire were Black, officials said.

The suspect, who was not immediately named by police, was heavily armed and dressed in tactical gear, including body armor, police said.

When confronted by officers in a vestibule of the store, the suspect held a gun to his own neck but they talked him into dropping the weapon and surrendering, Buffalo police commissioner Joseph Gramaglia told a news briefing.

Gramaglia said the gunman shot and killed three people in the parking lot of the Tops Friendly Market before exchanging fire with a former police officer working as a security guard for the store, but the suspect was protected by his body armor.

The guard was one of the 10 people shot to death in the incident, the nine others all being customers. Three other employees of the store, part of a regional chain, were wounded but are expected to survive, authorities said.

Stephen Belongia, the FBI special agent in charge of the bureau's Buffalo field office, said the attack would be investigated both as a hate crime and as an act of "racially motivated violent extremism" under federal law.

Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League said, "While details of the horrific shooting in Buffalo are still emerging, there are already strong indicators that the individual who allegedly carried out this attack was heavily influenced by white supremacist ideology, including the virulently anti-Semitic and racist 'Great Replacement' conspiracy theory. Make no mistake: This is the same hateful anti-Semitic bile that inspired the shooters in Pittsburgh, Poway, El Paso and Charleston."

"This person was pure evil," Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said, his voice quaking with emotion. "It was a straight-up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community."

The suspect was expected to make his first court appearance to face murder charges by day's end, officials said.

"This is a day of great pain for our community," Buffalo Mayor Bryon Brown told reporters. "Many of us have been in and out of this supermarket many times. ... We cannot let this hateful person divide our community or our country."

Brown said he had received calls from the White House and New York's attorney general, Letitia James.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Joe Biden had been briefed on the "horrific shooting."

Biden "will continue to receive updates throughout the evening and tomorrow as further information develops. The president and the first lady are praying for those who have been lost and for their loved ones," Jean-Pierre added.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the senior US senator from New York, said in a tweet: "We are standing with the people of Buffalo."

The governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, also tweeted that she was monitoring the situation, and asked people in Buffalo to "avoid the area and follow guidance from law enforcement and local officials."Rep. Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the attack appeared to be the work of a violent white supremacist.

"We must pass the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, without delay," he wrote on Twitter.

Last month, a "sniper-type" shooter opened fire in an upscale Washington neighborhood, wounding four people before taking his own life.

Police suspected that graphic video of that shooting which circulated online shortly afterward was filmed by the shooter himself, but have not confirmed the authenticity or if it was live-streamed.

Despite recurring mass-casualty shootings and a nationwide wave of gun violence, multiple initiatives to reform gun regulations have failed in the US Congress, leaving states and localities to enact their own restrictions.

The United States suffered 19,350 firearm homicides in 2020, up nearly 35 percent as compared to 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in its latest data.

(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles, Pete Schroeder and Moira Warburton in Washington; editing by Daniel Wallis)

How Mental Illness Spikes Street Crime And Political Extremism

How Mental Illness Spikes Street Crime And Political Extremism

Antisocial behavior has reached pandemic levels. Disruptive airline passengers are punching flight attendants. Thugs are attacking Asians, gays and other minority groups. Criminals have grown more brazen in bringing violence to the streets and into American politics as seen in the savage invasion of the Capitol on January 6.

Mental illness clearly underlies a lot of these disturbing trends, with the cracks widening during the COVID-19 scourge. The pandemic deprived many of community, personal interaction and, for those on the edge of psychic breakdown, the in-person mental health services they relied on or need.

America's system for supporting good mental health has never been strong to begin with. The 2008 Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act did help expand coverage, but getting insurance to pay for treatment of serious psychiatric problems remains problematic.

And the need has risen. From March through October of last year, hospital emergency rooms saw a surge of patients seeking urgent mental care, according to JAMA Psychiatry. The numbers were far lower in the same months of 2019, right before the pandemic hit. The crises ranged from suicide attempts to drug and opioid overdoses to abuse of partners and children.

Last year, a third of American adults displayed symptoms of clinical anxiety or depression, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That was up from 11 percent in previous years.

Many of the Capitol insurrectionists had a history of mental illness and related social dysfunction. We made fun of several.

Eric Munchel of Nashville, Tennessee, who brought restraints police use on hands, legs and arms to the Capitol, was dubbed the "zip-tie guy."

Actually, Munchel had been charged with assaulting a man and woman in 2013. Recently fired from his job at a bar, he entered the Capitol costumed in paramilitary gear, his mother at his side.

Sean McHugh of Auburn, California, who attacked Capitol police with chemical spray, had accused the officers of "protecting pedophiles." McHugh, it turns out, had done jail time for statutory rape of a 14-year-old girl.

It was thought at first that Rosanne Boyland had been crushed to death in the rush of stampeding vandals, but the medical examiner concluded that the Georgia resident died from an overdose of amphetamines. Boyland had a history of drug use, including a charge of felony drug possession. The pandemic cut off her in-person group meetings of addicts.

When you look at some of the creeps who had been attacking Asians, you find something more than the usual racial animus. The homeless man seen viciously stomping on a 65-year-old woman of Filipino origin in New York was on parole for having killed his mother in front of his five year-old sister.

Another homeless man with 90 prior arrests was charged with slashing a gay man. Both the criminal and the victim were Latino.

You see madness in the faces of airline passengers throwing tantrums over demands that they wear masks. Videos show the protesters, usually women, making noisy and self-righteous stands for their right to break the rules. No matter how normally these disrupters dress, they radiate the look of the unhinged.

The mission here isn't to solve the dearth of psychiatric services for those barely hanging on. Others can better do that. Rather, it's to note that fragile psyches often lie beneath the growth of appalling behavior. And a society in the grips of fraying social ties is going to suffer more of it.

We now have an evil mix of social isolation and extremist rhetoric that some use to confer an air of respectability to their delusions. The social services that keep the mentally unbalanced in check need to be strengthened — and soon.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com

FBI

FBI Will Bolster New York Police To Probe Surging Hate Crimes

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

With federal agents investigating more than two dozen anti-Semitic hate crime cases across New York City, they have opted to join forces with the New York Police Department (NYPD).

According to The Wall Street Journal, officials with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have noted that the bureau's agents "discussed anti-Semitic crimes with Jewish groups and held meetings and conference calls with community leaders in May as more than two dozen crimes with anti-Semitic motivations were reported to the NYPD."

The bureau is also hoping to bring forth public-relations strategies designed to encourage victims to report hate crimes to New York law enforcement authorities. Campaigns are also expected to be more diversified as they will feature a variation of "languages including Yiddish, Hebrew, and Mandarin."

The push for change comes as the New York Police Department has seen a dramatic increase in hate crime cases over the last several months. According to the publication, the law enforcement agency has "recorded 226 hate crimes in the city from Jan. 1 through May 23, a 93% increase from 117 reported during the same period last year." The NYPD has also reported a total of 89 arrests since Jan. 1 of this year.

Since many hate crime incidents go unreported, police officials have noted that there is a strong possibility that the actual number of cases could be significantly higher.

Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, expressed concern about the uptick in anti-Semitic cases signals another problem: extremists are rapidly becoming more unapologetically "emboldened."

Greenblatt said, "We're living in a moment where extremists feel emboldened."