Category: All About Guns
On Sunday, President Biden told a large assembly: “We must all work together to address the hate that remains a stain on the soul of America. . . . Our hearts are heavy once again, but the resolve must never, ever waver.”
He was responding, of course, to the mass shooting at the Tops Friendly Markets grocery store in Buffalo, New York, which left ten people dead and three injured.
The alleged shooter, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, drove several hours from his home in Conklin, New York, to a neighborhood and a market where shoppers were, in his estimation, most likely to be black. He was wearing tactical gear and armed with the Bushmaster XM-15 assault rifle he had bought legally in Endicott, New York, with the intention—reportedly detailed in his racist manifesto—to use it to shoot blacks.
Hate is not, as Biden labels it, an abstract stain on the soul of America. It is an idea that festers in the minds of violent people. It is our duty to get better at identifying and stopping these individuals before they hurt others.
And we can get better at identifying and stopping them.
Gendron had been actively ranting online about his hatred for blacks. He took inspiration from racist conspiracy theories on online message boards and explicitly identified himself as a fascist, white supremacist, racist, and anti-Semite. On the Internet, he had detailed plans to carry out a shooting targeting blacks similar to the one he wound up perpetrating in Buffalo.
Similarly, Frank James, the black man who traveled to New York from Philadelphia last month to shoot up ten passengers on a rush hour subway, had been raging online for a decade about blacks, whites, Latinos, and Jews. He also fumed against New York mayor Eric Adams and the city’s subway system and alluded to leaving Philadelphia to take action. And Robert Gregory Bowers had written colorfully about his intention to attack Jews (and his murderous hatred for blacks) before driving to Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018 and massacring 11 worshippers.
We should be devoting more resources both to intelligence-gathering about action-oriented violent rhetoric online and to the manpower needed to follow up on all such threats. These types of investigations, occurring in both federal and local agencies, are resource- and training-intensive.
Violently manifested hate is definitely growing. Anti-Semitic incidents broke records in 2021, and anti-Asian hate crimes have broken records for the past two years. In New York City, the country’s epicenter for hate crimes (thanks, in part, to its demographic diversity), crimes against blacks and gay men have doubled since last year. Who perpetrates these crimes? Whites, blacks, Latinos—it’s a sickness that crosses all racial and ethnic boundaries.
One commonality among attackers is a high degree of mental illness. As announced this month at a New York City Council hearing, police designated nearly half of all hate-crime arrestees as emotionally disturbed. The NYPD admitted that it wasn’t doing enough to track whether these suspects receive treatment or to coordinate with mental-health professionals.
High-risk mental illness was a known issue for Gendron, whom state police brought to a hospital last June after he wrote in high school about wanting to shoot people. The hospital released him a day and a half later. This story is tragically familiar. In 2017, Martial Simon reportedly “told a psychiatrist at the state-run Manhattan Psychiatric Center that it was just a matter of time before he pushed a woman to the train tracks.” This past January, he pushed Deloitte executive Michelle Go to her death from a Times Square subway platform.
In addition to these gaps in psychiatric oversight for individuals who have voiced an intention of committing violence, states including New York have reduced in-patient psychiatric beds dramatically. Sweeping criminal-justice reforms have hampered judges’ ability to induce unbalanced offenders into psychiatric care as a means of avoiding jail time.
Policymakers at all levels need to prioritize closing these gaps between police, prosecutors, and psychiatric practitioners and ensuring that sufficient spaces are available for the small but critical segment of the population that requires long-term supervision. As the president said, our hearts are heavy. Now let’s use our heads.
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Makes sense to me!
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UC-9 at the Range
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.
Doing so would acknowledge the basic mandates of morality. Certain offenses are so reprehensible as to be unforgiveable. To fail to answer a vicious, hate-motivated rampage with anything but death is to deny the requirements of retribution.
Just as important, executing Gendron sends a message to those deranged few who will admire his actions: violently enacting your bigotry is intolerable to our society. As I have argued, hate-crime laws can be seen as a set of guard rails, delimiting certain criminal behavior as incompatible with shared values of civic tolerance and respect for one’s fellow citizens. When those laws are egregiously violated, capital punishment can restore the moral order that the law exists to defend.
Punishing Gendron may seem so obvious as to not be worth mentioning. But the fixation on the vulgar political significance of his atrocity reveals our collective inability to think in such stark moral terms. In particular, taking the killer as mere symbol of white America’s depravity waives his responsibility for his actions. It reinforces the therapeutic morality, undergirding most criminal-justice progressivism, that sees brutal criminals as mere products of their environment, rather than freely choosing individuals culpable for their actions. Punishment, the philosopher Herbert Morris once argued, is the way that we treat wrongdoers as fully human, by acknowledging them as morally responsible agents. The moral drama of retribution should therefore be at the center of our analysis.
Politics does play a role here. Capital punishment is, for no particularly good reason, inoperative in New York State. Several candidates for governor have already called for its return in response to the shooting; others might join them. Gendron can also be charged under federal hate-crime and homicide laws carrying a possible penalty of death, just as Emmanuel AME church shooter Dylann Roof was. But doing so would require the Biden administration to undo its death penalty moratorium. If Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice is really serious about combatting hate crimes, then it will proceed accordingly.
Outrage is a subject of much public debate these days: whose outrage is appropriate, whose is not, and when outrage ought to play a role in decision-making. In the case of horrific crimes like Saturday’s shooting, however, outrage is a natural moral emotion that points us to a just end. Only a hard heart can look upon the brutal deaths of ten people and not feel it. Putting Payton Gendron to death is simply the state’s enactment of the horror and revulsion that so many feel. Failing to do so would be a rejection of public moral sense and decency.