BUFFALO | The racist killing of 10 African Americans in Buffalo on Saturday sent new shock waves across the United States and abroad, but America has also experienced yet another weekend of gun violence, a daily scourge that has been growing steadily since 2020.
• To read also: American carnage
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The statistics of firearm deaths in this country of 330 million inhabitants are chilling: nearly 45,000 deaths in 2021, including around 24,000 suicides, according to the organization Gun Violence Archive which compiles every day each of these tragedies throughout the territory.
There were 39,389 people killed in 2019, including 23,941 suicides. As of May 16, 2022, there are exactly 16,068 people who have lost their lives this year to firearms, including 8,976 suicides.
That is a staggering average rate of 118 deaths per day.
In a sign that the country is once again groggy, President Joe Biden travels to Buffalo on Tuesday to “share the pain of a community that lost ten of its own in a horrific and senseless mass shooting,” the White House announced. , who denounced “the hatred that remains a stain on the soul of America”.
Even the UN, through the voice of Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ spokesman, condemned a “despicable act of racist and violent extremism”.
“Domestic Terrorism”
In this city of Buffalo in the far north of New York state, on the edge of Lake Erie and the Canadian border, residents have been paying tribute since Sunday to those murdered in a Tops supermarket in a neighborhood mainly populated by African-Americans: The ten people killed are all black, said District Attorney John Flynn, and their killer is a young white supremacist accused of carrying out “a racist hate crime” and an act of “terrorism interior,” according to the authorities.
Payton Gendron, 18, drove more than 300 miles from his upstate home to carry out the massacre, even carrying out “a reconnaissance operation” the day before, according to police.
“This individual came with the goal of killing as many black people as possible,” said Buffalo’s African-American mayor, Byron Brown.
“Hate crime” in the United States refers to an act directed against a person because of elements of their identity such as race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation or disability. Considered an aggravated federal offence, it carries harsher sentences.
Payton Gendron, prosecuted for “premeditated murder”, pleaded not guilty during a first appearance this weekend and must return to court on May 19.
The young man carried a camera and broadcast his crime live on Twitch even though the platform claimed to have removed the content “two minutes” after the start of its broadcast.
He also published a 180-page racist “manifesto” before his crime, which, according to the American media, associates him with white supremacists and far-right conspirators, supporters of the “great replacement” theory.
“Weekend in America”
But Buffalo is far from an isolated drama.
Saturday’s racist killing is reminiscent of those in El Paso (Texas) in August 2019 (23 dead, including a majority of people of Hispanic origin) and Charleston (South Carolina) in June 2015 (nine African-Americans killed in a church ).
And it is part of a cycle of two particularly violent days, summed up by the Democratic governor of New Jersey as “a weekend in America” like any other: a person of Taiwanese origin killed on Sunday and four others seriously injured by a man who opened fire at a church in Laguna Woods, California; two dead and three injured in a market in Houston, the huge megalopolis of Texas; 21 injured Saturday night in Milwaukee, Wis., in firefights at three locations in the city after a basketball game. The authorities had to impose a curfew.
Gunfire in the streets and public places is a daily occurrence in the United States and gun crime is on the rise in major cities like New York, Chicago, Miami or San Francisco, especially since the 2020 pandemic.
Several initiatives by elected officials to strengthen gun laws have failed in Congress in recent years, with the powerful NRA gun lobby remaining highly influential.
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