Investigators work at the scene of a shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, NY on Monday.
Matt Rourke / AP
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Matt Rourke / AP
Investigators work at the scene of a shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, NY on Monday.
Matt Rourke / AP
Follow mass shooting at a grocery store In a predominantly black neighborhood in Buffalo, NY, investigators said they were reviewing a document published online filled with racial slurs and “alternative” theories. .
180 pages document, believed to have been built by the Buffalo gunman, includes parts obtained from other sources, according to an analysis by NPR. This pattern of imitation is common among mass shooters, experts say.
Matt Kriner, senior research scholar at the Middlebury Institute, said: “It’s not unusual, especially in the neo-Nazi space, that people take other people’s work and run after it. Center for Counter-Terrorism, Extremism and Counter-Terrorismtold NPR.
Kriner countered claims that the gunman’s document was filled with plagiarism and instead said the shooter copied it.
What the Buffalo gunman involved in his copying, says Kriner, was “the transfer of ideas from one violent person to another.”
“So when we analyze it, what we’re looking for is how much of that story is directly geared towards justifying the violence that he committed in Buffalo? And that’s consistent. with how much to justify the violence we’ve seen in Christchurch and elsewhere,” he added.
The 180-page document details how an attack would be carried out, even pointing out why the gunman chose the Tops grocery store.
In detail in the document, the shooter refers to the so-called “great alternative” – a white supremacist conspiracy theories argues that people of color are being brought into America and other Western countries to overcome and “replace” white voters.
Gunman killed 51 worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand at a mosque in 2019 also believe in this same theory; The Buffalo grocery store shooting suspect said the New Zealand gunman was the inspiration.
Heather Williams, one senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, told NPR that today’s white extremism movement is simply “post-organizational”.
“Most of these violent extremists do not explicitly align themselves with an organized group,” says Williams. “It is difficult for law enforcement or others to determine that a person is considering or planning an act of violent extremism and to prevent that event before it occurs.”
The 18-year-old suspect has been charged with first-degree murder, authorities said investigate attack in Buffalo as a racially motivated hate crime and is being considered for terrorism charges.
The FBIseparately, is investigating the incident as a hate crime and racially motivated violent extremism.
The similarity between the Buffalo shooter’s alleged material and that of other extremists alarmed Kriner.
“I think we’ll probably see other people come out and do something like this, maybe quote him, maybe quote Christchurch back, and what we’ll see is they’re very similar in nature. pictures of them wearing weapons and people, what they say why they do it and the manifesto they write,” he said. “I think the first thing we can do right now is define what the actors are for them.”
NPR’s Rina Torchinsky contributed to this report.
