Payton Gendron - the 18-year-old who walked into a supermarket, Tops Friendly Market on Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo , and opened fire with a gun, killing ten people and wounding three - used the esoteric symbol dear to the Nazis in his poster. “Black sun”, also used in the past by the Ukrainian fighters of the ultra-nationalist Azov regiment .
A generic supremacist symbol, used by groups from around the world, which however has sparked the controversy of those who believe that the US is financing the supremacists in Ukraine.
In reality, according to the 180-page document posted by the young man, who has already been arrested and declared himself "supremacist" and "anti-Semitic" in court, his models are other: from Luca Traini for the attack on Macerata in 2018 to Dylan Roof , the boy who killed six African Americans in a church in South Carolina, passing through Brenton Tarrant , the New Zealand killer who killed 50 Muslims in two mosques.
His extremist views were formed on the 4Chan chat, the same that launched the QAnon movement: here he embraced the theory of the "extinction of whites" and other controversial theories such as that of the "Great Replacement" , that is, whites "replaced by minorities ".
As his high school friends tell Conklin, he liked "video games, especially those where you shoot". In June 2021 , his school alerted the police to his behavior and called him a "problem kid who said he wanted to shoot a graduation ceremony or after".
Gendron acted - after a long lockdown where he would radicalize and develop his plan - in one of the areas with the highest concentration of African Americans in Buffalo with a semi- automatic assault weapon , a legally purchased AR-15, on which had engraved the name of Virginia Sorenson, one of the victims of the 2021 massacre in Waukesha, when an African American had hurled himself with the SUV on a Christmas parade. Name to which he had added the words: "This is your compensation." "I wanted to kill African Americans," he told investigators openly.
An attack of "internal terrorism", as US President Joe Biden defined it, who speaks of "hatred as a stain on the soul of America".
(Unioneonline / D)