The Editorial Board: The Buffalo Massacre Demonstrates Again Why Military-Style Weapons Should Be Kept Off The Streets

A common line of reasoning that we have often heard is that “a nice guy with a gun” can stop a shooter trying to mass murder. That didn’t work on May 14. Heroic Tops security guard Aaron Salter, a former Buffalo police officer, bravely confronted the shooter as he entered the store, but Salter was shot to death after pulling out and firing his own gun. He was no match for heavy armor and a modified AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. So a good guy, a very good guy, was killed at the age of 55, leaving three children.

Essentially a military-style weapon, the Remington Bushmaster XM-15 used by the accused shooting suspect is the same weapon used at Sandy Hook Elementary School and in Nashville, Tennessee, the sites of two other mass murders.

The suspect was able to purchase it because a previous owner had modified it to limit the magazine to 10 round magazines; New York State law prohibits the use of high-capacity magazines with more than 10 rounds. After purchasing the gun, the suspect quickly undone the modification with a power drill so the rifle could fire 30 rounds at a time.

It is disturbing that Payton Gendron was able to buy any gun. He should have been subject to New York’s 2019 red flag law, which prohibits those who are likely to cause harm to themselves or others from owning firearms. But despite the fact that, as part of a school project last year, the suspect had made threatening comments about wanting to commit a murder-suicide and was held for a mental health evaluation, no red flag order was filed against him. . Gendron was able to purchase the weapon of choice from him a few months ago at a store in Endicott, thanks to a clean background check.

And then he personalized his weapon, not only making it more deadly, but branding it with the handwritten names of other mass shooters and other victims, as well as hateful racial slurs. Through these means, the gun became more than just a killing tool, as if that wasn’t bad enough. It became a symbol of hate, a twisted totem glorifying the goals of white supremacist doctrine.

If this chain of events sounds all too familiar, that’s because it’s meant to. The copycat mentality here has been documented in the suspect’s lengthy online ramblings. That includes the weapon, deliberately chosen due to its iconic stature as the way to kill as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. We won’t dignify any of the suspect’s 100 pages of ramblings on gun selection and the glories of the AR-15 by quoting any of it. Instead, we quote President Biden, who said during his brief visit to Buffalo: “We can keep assault weapons off our streets. We have done it before.

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