Buffalo Victim’s Son Says SCOTUS Gun Ruling Is ‘Very American’—in All the Wrong Ways
Just weeks after an 18-year-old white supremacist killed 10 people and injured several more at a Buffalo supermarket, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday gutted a New York gun-control law that imposed limits on obtaining a concealed handgun license. And family members of the victims at the Tops Friendly Supermarket massacre are, as one put it, “mad as hell.”
“It’s a slap in the face. It’s a kick in the behind,” Garnell Whitfield, who lost his 86-year-old mother Ruth to the May shooting, told The Daily Beast on Thursday. “It’s insulting, it’s disappointing, and honestly, it’s just hurtful. But at the end of the day, it’s also very American.”
Prosecutors say racist teen Payton Gendron bought into a conspiracy theory about white people supposedly being endangered and proceeded to target Black shoppers for meticulous slaughter, ultimately shooting 13 people. He now faces several murder charges, 26 counts of hate crimes, and firearms offenses after allegedly explaining in a handwritten note to his parents he “had to commit this attack” because he cared “for the future of the white race.”