The left’s rush to politicize shootings is sickening, and it’s making things worse.
Wilfred Reilly writes at Spiked:
Buffalo and the myth of America’s race warThis week 19 children and two teachers were killed by a lone gunman at a primary school in Uvalde, Texas. The motive is not yet known.Two weeks before this, as we all know by now, on 14 May 2022 a lunatic armed with a semi-automatic rifle entered a Tops Friendly Market store in Buffalo, New York, opened fire and killed 10 people while wounding three more. That the gunman is guilty is not in dispute: he livestreamed the attack on the gamer-heavy social-media site, Twitch. That he was a vile racist is not in question: he warned about the ‘replacement’ of whites in a badly written 180-page manifesto and intentionally targeted one of the few Buffalo chain stores located in a heavily black neighbourhood. Even the eventual outcome of the shooter’s trial is not in much doubt – the shooter should, and will, be killed by the state or locked away for years.But, in his remarks following the Buffalo shooting, US president Joe Biden ventured well beyond these points of consensus and talked about the shooter in relation to ‘white supremacy’. Biden described white supremacy as a very significant problem in modern America – ‘a poison… fester[ing] and grow[ing] before our eyes’ – and went on to criticise right-wing media personalities for allegedly amplifying versions of the racist Great Replacement theory.These broad claims are nothing new. As I have noted before, a recent best-selling book argues that minority Americans supposedly face a literal attempted genocide at the hands of bigots. Biden himself has described white supremacy as ‘the most lethal threat to the US’. Nor was Biden alone in expressing such sentiments specifically after 14 May. Indeed, a widely circulated article in Rolling Stone magazine was provocatively headlined, ‘The Buffalo shooter isn’t a lone wolf – he’s a mainstream Republican’.
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