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Buffalo’s mass shooting demonstrates failure of America’s ability to stop gun violence
May 15, 2022 1 min, 33 secs
Mourners attend a vigil for victims of the shooting at a TOPS supermarket in Buffalo on May 15.BRENDAN MCDERMID/Reuters.

Again and again and again – and now after the death on Saturday of 10 people, most of them Black, in a Buffalo supermarket that stood as a symbol of neighbourhood rebirth – Americans ask these questions.

Those beyond the country’s borders look across the seas and across an 8,900 kilometre frontier and wonder how often this will happen, how long until the next episode, how this trinity of tragedy – guns, hate, violence – can be tolerated.

“This is a horrible, horrible, unspeakable tragedy, going beyond all of our imagination and our thinking about how safe you can be to be in America and be African American,” Stephanie Barber-Geter, President of the Hamlin Park Community and Taxpayers Association, which represents 62 blocks of the city, said over the telephone shortly after the gunfire ceased, but as the metaphorical echoes of the shots ricocheted up and down her street.

Every unhappy city stained by mass violence – Sacramento, Pittsburgh, and Corsicana, Tex., along with Buffalo this year alone – is unhappy in its own way, but the unhappiness runs especially deep in Buffalo.

The supermarket was an emblem of hope, planted by a grocery chain that itself had endured financial distress, and is frequented by neighbours who include Mayor Byron Brown, who is Black, and students from Canisius College, a Jesuit institution about to inaugurate its first Black president.

“As this goes, so goes all of us,” John Hurley, the current president of the college, which sits one kilometre from the supermarket, said only hours after the rampage.

That neighbourhood now is a scene of tragedy, and the supermarket a symbol of disrupted hope?

Barber-Geter, the president of the civic association and whose home is seven blocks from the supermarket

Will Black people in the neighbourhood be willing to go back

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