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US President Joe Biden will travel Tuesday to Buffalo, New York, where an investigation into a shooting at a food market that killed 10 people is ongoing.
Biden described the attacker as “a hateful soul.”
The White House described the incident as “a horrific and senseless mass shooting.”
Speaking in Washington on Sunday, Biden said the US Justice Department is investigating the shooting as “a hate crime, a racial act of white supremacy and violent extremism.”
“We must all work together to address the hate that remains a stain on America’s soul,” Biden said.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the shooting, and his spokesman said Sunday that Guterres was “shocked by the killing of 10 people in a vile act of racist and violent extremism in Buffalo.”
Authorities identified the 18-year-old shooter as Payton Gendron, of Conklin, New York, about 200 miles southeast of Buffalo. He is white and 11 of the 13 shooting victims were black.
Authorities said he carried out the attack while wearing military attire and broadcasting it live on a helmet camera. He eventually dropped his gun and turned himself in to police inside the Tops Friendly Market, located in a predominantly black neighborhood in the city of 255,000.
Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown told the show on Sunday “Face the Nation” from CBS Police “are reviewing every item, every detail in this shooter’s background to piece together why this happened, how it happened, and why this person came to the city of Buffalo to commit this horrific crime.”
“It certainly saddens us that someone drove from hundreds of miles away, someone who was not from this community, who did not know this community, who came here to take as many Black lives as possible, who did this deliberately and premeditatedly. planning this,” said Brown, who is Buffalo’s first black mayor.
“But we are a strong community and we will continue to move forward,” he said. “This is a community that is undergoing development. People have been waiting and waiting for investments, growth and opportunities. We will not allow hateful ideology to stop the progress we are seeing and experiencing in the city of Buffalo.”
As is often the case after mass shootings in the United States, Brown called on Congress to enact tougher gun control laws, saying, “We need to put more pressure on lawmakers in Washington, those who have been obstructionists, to control guns sensibly, so that reforming the way guns are allowed to proliferate and fall into the wrong hands in this country.”
Such pleas after past mass shootings have largely gone unheeded, with little change to gun control laws.
Gendron was arraigned in court Saturday night on first-degree murder charges and was ordered held without bail. Another court hearing is scheduled for the next few days.
At an earlier news conference, Erie County Sheriff John Garcia called the shooting a hate crime.
“This was pure evil. went straight [un] racially motivated hate crime of someone outside of our community … who came into our community and tried to inflict that evil on us,” Garcia said.
Investigators said they are reviewing a lengthy statement they suspect was posted online by the gunman describing his white supremacist motivations and ideology. The 180-page document details the perpetrator’s radicalization on Internet forums, as well as a plan to target a predominantly black neighborhood.
The author also described himself as a fascist and an anti-Semite. The statement repeats a far-right conspiracy theory that baselessly argues that the white population in Western countries is being reduced, or “replaced,” by non-white immigrants.
Mayor Brown said the combination of weapons and that ideology is fuel.
“It’s not just Buffalo, New York. It is the communities in every corner of this country that are not safe with guns and with the hateful ideology that has been allowed to proliferate on social media and the internet,” he told CBS. “That has to be controlled. That has to be stopped. It is not freedom of expression. It is not American speech. It’s hate speech. And it must end.”
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