The urgent need to regulate access to firearms was emphasized on Saturday by the group March for our Lives , made up of students from the Parkland (Florida) institute, which was the scene of a mass shooting in 2018: What happened in Buffalo shows “the failure” of US politicians, they said.
“Our country should have done everything in its power much sooner to prevent weapons from falling into the wrong hands. Instead, the cult of guns in the United States fuels this white supremacist violence,” the group said in a tweet. Several Democratic congressmen also discreetly pointed out the need to strengthen control, accusing the Republicans of torpedoing again and again any legislative initiative, which leaves states and municipalities the power to enact their own rules.
This does not seem like the most favorable moment —in the middle of the campaign for the complicated mid-term elections— to raise again a potentially explosive issue, which traces one of the many failures between Republicans and Democrats. The polarization that Donald Trump’s mandate threw off, taken to its maximum consequences, is also in the chamber of the Buffalo massacre.
“A heinous massacre by a white supremacist,” Governor Kathy Hochul, a Buffalo native, tweeted on Saturday night. It was the first policy that gave a name and surname to a core threat to the security of the United States: that of internal, or domestic, extremism.
In the 20 years since 9/11, far-right extremists have killed more people in the US than Islamist terrorists based in the country. FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress last September that the Capitol raid was not an isolated incident.and that “the problem of domestic terrorism has been spreading throughout the country for several years.” This is confirmed by the records, since 2014, with exponential growth, especially pronounced in 2020 and 2021.
Wray added that white supremacists constitute “the majority representation of domestic terrorism in general” and “have been responsible for the deadliest attacks in the last decade.” Examples are not lacking, such as the murder of nine black parishioners in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white man, in 2015.
Dylann Roof, the young man who shot up the church , is one of the names cited by Gendron, although he says feel a special connection with the New Zealand supremacist: “The one who radicalized me the most”, as he has recorded, with the expertise of a notary and the delirium of someone completely lacking in judgment, in that hate memo.