Senior reacts to Buffalo shooting

On May 14, 2022, around 2:30 p.m., 18 year old Payton S. Gendron entered a Tops Friendly Markets store located in Buffalo, New York, and shot and killed 10 people, while injuring three others. Out of the 14 people, 11 of the victims were black. 

At the same time of the event, Gendron live streamed the mass shooting on Twitch, a live streaming site for games and vlogs. After conducting the shootings, Gendron let himself be taken into custody by police without putting up a fight. 

Adding on to that, the mass shooting has been reported as an act of domestic terrorism. Reports say that Gendron managed the racially motivated hate crime to support the Great Replacement Theory. According to Wikipedia,“The Great Replacement, also known as the replacement theory is a white nationalist  far-right conspiracy theory disseminated by French author Renaud Camus. The original theory states that, with the complicity or cooperation of ‘replacist’ elites, the white European populations are being demographically and culturally replaced with non-white peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans.” 

Senior Markus Ambrose said, “When I first saw the video on Instagram, It shocked me. It made me think, why would someone be so motivated with hate to kill people of the other race? At the same time, I read the caption, and the dude was only 18 years old, which really made me sick to the stomach because that’s the same age as me. Although I don’t really like to talk about politics and laws, it made me wonder if we should hold stronger gun restriction rules. It also made me wonder if I should fear for my safety and others because it seems as if things will never change. People will always have their opinions on certain things and whether it’s right or wrong. There will always be more than one side.”

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