National Review
Online
Tuesday, May 17,
2022
After an atrocity such as Saturday’s
mass murder at a Buffalo supermarket, in which ten people were killed and
three others wounded, it takes time to gather all the information, as
investigators mobilize to gather evidence, interview witnesses, and figure out
what motivated the killer. Initial reports tend to be incomplete or inaccurate,
and the impulse to instantly fit moments of national shock, grief, and anger
into a political agenda should be resisted.
This much, though, we can say with
confidence. Police arrested an 18-year-old male, and the evidence that he is
the shooter and that the massacre was motivated by racial hatred appears
overwhelming. He wore camouflage and body armor, and allegedly carried out the
attack with an AR-15-style firearm. Of the 13 victims, eleven were African
Americans, including 55-year-old Aaron Salter Jr., a former police officer and
grocery-store security guard who lost his life heroically confronting the
gunman. Also among those senselessly mowed down were elderly women who were
just shopping on a Saturday afternoon: 88-year-old Ruth Whitfield and
65-year-old Celeste Chaney.
The suspect has been convincingly
associated with a 180-page manifesto, oozing with anti-black racism and a
conspiracy theory about a plot to “replace” whites. Naturally, this has
progressives spewing their rote condemnations of systemic racism, Trump supporters,
and Republicans generally — when not railing against the availability of guns.
While more investigation must be done for
a clearer picture to emerge, we suspect it may be at least equally relevant
that the alleged shooter was referred to a hospital for a mental-health
evaluation last year, after making what Buffalo police describe as “generalized
threats” at his high school. The threats are said not to have been racist in
nature, and he was released after a day and a half of examination and observation.
Police say he thereafter remained off the radar of state and federal law
enforcement. But it is not yet clear what (if any) meaningful follow-up
investigation was done. Nor is it clear whether more could and should have been
done under existing laws to prevent him from having access to firearms.
As investigators press these questions,
the authorities will sort out whether state prosecutors or the Justice
Department will take the lead. A state murder prosecution would be the most straightforward
choice, and thus the one with the best chance of convicting a mass murderer.
The Justice Department has, however, been very aggressive in using the
civil-rights laws to invoke federal jurisdiction, and quirks of New York law
give the feds the upper hand if they want to take the case. A federal
civil-rights murder prosecution is more complex, but it could also result in
capital charges, which are not available under New York law. For that, the
Biden administration would have to overlook its stated aversion to the death
penalty (as Democratic administrations reliably do when horrific killings
happen on their watch).
The Buffalo massacre has revitalized calls
for domestic-terrorism legislation. But penal statutes, including those that
are commonly used in terrorism cases, are enforcement tools, not political
labels. There are more than enough laws on the books to prosecute terrorists,
whether domestic or foreign. Federal and state prosecutors have done that with
smashing success for decades. Calls for additional terrorism legislation are
transparently political, a ploy to brand an ideology as “terrorist” and then
tie that label to political opponents one claims are somehow tied to the
ideology, and hence the “terrorism.”
It is an especially noxious element of
today’s tribalism, together with the frank disparity in how such massacres are
discussed and handled.
The Biden administration has been rightly
quick to condemn the racial hatred that appears to have fueled the carnage in
Buffalo. But it was tongue-tied a month ago when racial hatred appeared to fuel
a black man’s shooting spree at a Brooklyn subway station, omitting abundant
evidence of that shooter’s racist rants from the complaint it filed in district
court. The Capitol rioters are portrayed as white-supremacist
domestic-terrorist insurrectionists, while Black Lives Matter anti-police
demonstrations are presented as “mostly peaceful protests” no matter how
violent they get.
The occasional rioters who do something
heinous enough to get charged — such as the left-wing radical lawyers who
firebombed a police squad car in New York — are regarded as overzealous
activists who merit our sympathy rather than throw-the-book-at-’em
condemnation. In a routine that would be comical but for the egregious circumstances,
jihadist aggression is met with bemusement over whether we’ll ever know the
motive, and progressive admonitions that “violent extremism” is the preferred
label since “terrorism” is so “Islamophobic.”
How much easier and healthier it would be
to condemn all such violence, whatever the rantings of the perpetrators — to
convey a single message, applicable in every such case, that the use of force
is the redline in our democracy, warranting universal vilification and vigorous
prosecution.
The atrocity in Buffalo raises serious
issues: how fringe ideologies interact with mental illness to cause
violence; whether our law-enforcement agencies are taking enough action on
warning signs; whether they are hamstrung by law and mores that need to be rethought.
We would be in a better position to answer these fraught questions if we
avoided the farce of politicizing an event when we have barely begun to
understand it.
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