Hochul promises to stop violent extremist acts in New York.
After the shooting in Buffalo that killed 10 people, Gov. Kathy Hochul gave orders to strengthen the state’s “red flag” law and set up new units to go after violent extremism online.
Days after a deadly mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul took a number of strong steps on Wednesday to tighten the state’s gun laws and look into the social media sites where the suspected gunman may have become radicalized and where police say he streamed his racist attack.
The State Police led the creation of a new unit to track violent extremism online. The State Police were also told to use New York’s “red-flag” law to get emergency orders to seize weapons from people who are thought to be a threat to themselves or others.
Ms. Hochul also asked the state attorney general, Letitia James, to look into the role of several online platforms, like the chat app Discord, where the suspect posted racist messages before the Saturday afternoon massacre.
Like other mass shootings in the U.S., the attack in Buffalo has brought up discussions about mental health, white supremacy, and access to guns. It has also led to calls for changes to federal law, which are often ignored.
Ms. Hochul made it clear that, in response to the attack, which killed 10 people in a mostly Black neighborhood, she was taking concrete steps to make the state’s laws even stricter. These laws are already some of the strictest in the country.
At a news conference in her Manhattan office, the governor said, “This is the worst case of white supremacy in this country.” “It’s spreading through our society and our country, and now it’s taken people from our family.”
The man charged with the killings, Payton Gendron, went about 200 miles from his home in Conklin, N.Y., in the Southern Tier to find a place with a lot of Black people, the police say. He did this because he wanted to kill Black people.
In his online posts, Mr. Gendron, who is 18 years old, talked a lot about “replacement theory,” which says that white people are being “replaced” by people of color. All 10 people who died in the Buffalo attack were Black, making it one of the most racist mass shootings in recent U.S. history.
In a letter to Ms. James, the governor asked the attorney general to “investigate the specific online platforms that were used to broadcast and amplify the suspect’s acts and intentions.”
For this kind of investigation, subpoenas could be used to force witnesses to testify and companies could be asked to keep records related to Mr. Gendron’s actions, which the police say included livestreaming the attack on Twitch, a site owned by Amazon. The company took down his channel quickly, but pieces of his video kept getting shared on the internet.
In her request to Ms. James, Ms. Hochul also specifically mentioned the websites 4chan and 8chan, where some message boards are full of racist and antisemitic messages like the ones that made Mr. Gendron angry. In a personal diary he kept on Discord, he said that “his current beliefs” came from 4chan, which he said he had started to look at early on in the pandemic.
In a statement, Ms. James said that her office was “taking serious steps” to look into the roles these companies played in this attack.
“These dangerous and hateful platforms have caused real-world destruction over and over again,” she said in the statement. “And we’re doing everything we can to bring attention to this scary behavior and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
On Monday, it came out that Mr. Gendron had easily avoided New York’s three-year-old “red-flag law” to buy an assault-style weapon in January, even though he had been held for a mental health evaluation last year after saying he wanted to do a “murder-suicide.”
Mr. Gendron told the authorities that his “murder-suicide” answer to a question on a school project was a joke when he was being evaluated. He was let go, and there was no red-flag order. He later bought a semiautomatic rifle and posted on Discord that he had lied about his comment being a joke.
“That is why I think I can still buy guns,” he wrote. “That wasn’t a joke; I wrote it down because I was going to do it.”
On Tuesday, President Biden went to Buffalo to comfort families and show his support for stronger gun laws at the federal level. He did say, however, that it would be “very difficult” to get these laws passed because many Republicans in Congress are strongly against them.
In New York, Ms. Hochul’s actions on the red-flag law, which she did by executive order, could make it hard for the State Police to do their job, since they get hundreds of calls about school threats every year.
The state’s “red-flag” law already lets school administrators, parents, and law enforcement ask for a court order, called a “extreme-risk protection order,” to take weapons away from people they think are dangerous.
The head of the State Police, Kevin P. Bruen, said that New York troopers knew the law well and had already asked for about 300 red-flag orders.
“We’re going to get it done,” he said. “If the governor tells the State Police to do something, we’ll do it.”
The State Office of Court Administration says that only about 600 of these orders have been made since the law went into effect in 2019.
Jeffrey W. Swanson, a professor at Duke University who works with the law school’s Center for Firearms Law and studies red-flag measures, said, “Just passing the law won’t necessarily do anything if the people who know about it don’t know about the option.”
Professor Swanson said that if he were to adopt the measure, he would call for a “systematic, administratively driven effort to not only teach people about it, but also include it and make it a routine.”
Law enforcement officials and his own online diary say that Mr. Gendron, who has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, went to Buffalo’s East Side to look at possible massacre sites. On Saturday, the police said, he started shooting outside of a Tops supermarket. He then went inside and kept shooting shoppers and workers until he finally gave himself up.
On Wednesday, Ms. Hochul, a Democrat in her first term who is running for re-election this year, also asked the Democratic-controlled Legislature to pass more gun safety laws. Some of these laws were already being thought about before the Buffalo shooting.
Ms. Hochul specifically asked for a law that would require semiautomatic pistols to have what is called a “microstamp.” This would help police find the gun that fired cartridge cases found at crime scenes. Microstamping has been talked about in Albany for a long time, and bills have been introduced there since at least 2009. In 2007, California passed microstamping laws despite strong opposition from gun manufacturers.
The governor, who is from the Buffalo area, has said many times that he is worried about the spread of hate speech online. He has called it “a virus” and criticized “social media platforms where this hate can be spewed.”
A person with knowledge of the situation said Wednesday that Mr. Gendron invited 15 people to look at his online diary about 30 minutes before the attack. It looks like none of the people have told the police. In the diary, Mr. Gendron often wrote about himself posing with the gear and gun he used in the attack. He also wrote detailed plans for the attack, including hand-drawn maps.
He wrote that the first attack was just the beginning of a larger massacre in which he planned to kill as many Black people as he could. During a trip to the city to prepare, he even counted the number of Black people on the street. He also ruled out other cities he had thought about going after earlier in the year, when it was colder and people might have been too covered up to tell what race they were.
In her speech, Ms. Hochul said that she hoped the shooting on Saturday would be a “wake-up call” for the country. She mentioned gun violence in Parkland, Florida, and Sandy Hook, Connecticut, as well as attacks by white supremacists in Charleston, South Carolina, Pittsburgh, and El Paso.
Ms. Hochul said she didn’t want Buffalo to “ever be on that list” of cities, but she did want it to be a place where “they did something.”
She said, “We’re going to do something.” “Right now, we’re up to something.”
