Buffalo Supermarket Shooting: Buffalo Shooting: Suspect Was Held For Mental Health Evaluation Last Year (Published 2022) (2024)

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Grief and Anger Sweep Through Buffalo a Day After a Racist Massacre

But Mr. Gendron picked his target carefully, the police said, choosing an area known for its large Black population and even visiting the neighborhood the day before the attack in what authorities described as “reconnaissance.”

And nearly a year before the mass shooting, his words had already caused alarm elsewhere.

The police said on Sunday that Mr. Gendron had been picked up at his high school last June by state police after making a threatening remark and had been taken to a hospital for a mental health evaluation.

Responding to a question for a class project about his post-graduation plans, Mr. Gendron said his involved a murder-suicide, a law enforcement official familiar with the case said.

But Mr. Gendron described the remark as a joke, the official said. And after the evaluation, which lasted about a day and a half, he was released, according to Joseph Gramaglia, the Buffalo police commissioner.

That account was confirmed by Special Agent Steven Belongia of the F.B.I., who said that Mr. Gendron was “not on the radar” of federal authorities.

Mr. Gendron, who the police said wore body armor and camouflage during his spree, is believed to have posted a lengthy screed riddled with racist writings and expressing admiration for a white supremacist ideology known as replacement theory, as well as for gunmen in other racist mass shootings.

“This individual came here with the express purpose of taking as many Black lives as he could,” said Mayor Byron Brown, a Democrat who is Buffalo’s first Black mayor.

The White House announced that President Biden and Jill Biden, the first lady, will visit Buffalo on Tuesday “to grieve with the community that lost 10 lives in a senseless and horrific mass shooting.” On Sunday night, the police identified the victims — a cross-section of a working-class neighborhood where the Tops store acted as both a crucial source of groceries and a community hub.

The dead included a retired Buffalo police officer, Aaron Salter Jr., 55, who worked at the grocery store as a security guard and was being hailed as a hero for confronting the gunman, and Ruth Whitfield, an 86-year-old grandmother of eight. Some died running errands: Celestine Chaney, 65, for example, who simply wanted to get strawberries to make shortcakes, or Roberta Drury, 32, who was just getting food for dinner. Heyward Patterson, 67, was killed helping to put groceries into another shopper’s car.

Four people were shot in the store’s parking lot and nine others inside, including Mr. Salter: He exchanged shots with the gunman, who was firing an assault weapon and protected by heavy body armor, according to Mark Poloncarz, the Erie County executive.

On Sunday, a patch of blood still stained the parking lot’s asphalt, as a range of state, federal and local officers worked the scene. The blocks surrounding the site were filled with elected officials and neighborhood mourners.

“A lot of my peers, my friends, the cop, they were in there,” said Karen Martin, 64, who came to the store on Sunday morning to pay her respects. “I just don’t believe that he did that.”

The sense of grief was also mixed with outrage. Local Black religious leaders pleaded with their white brethren in other parts of the state and country to do their part to counter racism and white supremacy.

“Don’t tell me you’re a friend of our community and you don’t address this today at your pulpit,” said Bishop Darius Pridgen of the True Bethel Baptist Church in Buffalo, adding, “If you do not stand behind those holy desks and acknowledge that there are still people who hate Black people, you can go to hell with the shooter for all I care. Because at the end of the day, if you’re silent right now, you are not a friend of mine.”

The attack on Saturday was the deadliest mass shooting in the United States this year, joining a grim roster of other racist massacres in recent years, including the killing of nine Black parishioners at a church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015; an antisemitic rampage in the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 in Pittsburgh that left 11 people dead; and an attack at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, where the man charged had expressed hatred of Latinos and killed more than 20 people.

Extremists motivated by racial and ethnic hatred are considered the most dangerous threat among domestic terrorists. After a spate of horrific shootings targeting people of color and Jews in 2019, the F.B.I. elevated the threat to the highest level, meaning agents must prioritize developing confidential informants and take other steps to counter the violence.

Law enforcement officials said that Mr. Gendron, who has been charged with first-degree murder and pleaded not guilty on Saturday night, had traveled halfway across the state to commit his crime. The document he is believed to have written and posted online in the days leading up to the attack had mentioned that Buffalo was the nearest city to his home in the Southern Tier — a predominantly white region that runs along New York’s southern border with Pennsylvania — that had a major Black population.

On Sunday morning, F.B.I. agents and members of other law enforcement agencies gathered in front of Mr. Gendron’s home in Conklin, N.Y., a suburban town with rolling hills in the southern part of Broome County, about a 200-mile drive from Buffalo.

Neighbors there recalled watching Mr. Gendron play basketball in the driveway with his siblings, and some even had attended his front-yard high school graduation party last year, where they said there was no indication of trouble.

Others, however, said that there were signs of rebellion and odd behavior, including a moment after in-person schooling resumed when he wore a full hazmat suit to class.

“He wore the entire suit: boots, gloves, everything,” said Nathan Twitchell, 19, a former classmate at Susquehanna Valley High School.

Kolton Gardner, 18, of Conklin, who attended middle school and high school with Mr. Gendron, described him as “definitely a little bit of an outcast.”

“I knew he had an interest in guns, but where we grew up that wasn’t uncommon,” Mr. Gardner said.

That interest was apparently avid enough to encourage a purchase: Robert Donald, the owner of Vintage Firearms in Endicott, N.Y., said Sunday that he recently sold a Bushmaster assault weapon to Mr. Gendron.

“I just can’t believe it. I don’t understand why an 18-year-old would even do this,” said Mr. Donald, 75, who primarily sells collectible firearms. “I know I didn’t do anything wrong, but I feel terrible about it.”

Mr. Gendron’s writings were littered with racist, anti-immigrant views that claimed white Americans were at risk of being replaced by immigrants or people of color, once-fringe ideas that have been given a fuller airing in recent years by some prominent conservative commentators.

On the far right, the theory, which sometimes blames Jews for fomenting the “great replacement,” has been tied to gunmen in several other mass shootings as well as the 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va. that devolved into violence.

At a midday news conference on Sunday, Mr. Gramaglia, the police commissioner, said that state and federal authorities had sought warrants for information about Mr. Gendron’s digital activities. They pursued access to his computers and phones, as well as searches of his home and vehicle. He added that authorities believed that Mr. Gendron acted alone.

He was placed on suicide watch and separated from the general population at the Erie County Holding Center, said John Garcia, the Erie County sheriff, who refused to say the suspect’s name — referring to him by his inmate identification number — and called his actions “pure evil.”

Mr. Gendron surrendered after putting his weapon to his chin, said Mr. Gramaglia, who praised his officers for their fast response to the shooting. Still, some community members wondered how Mr. Gendron — who authorities said had two other guns in the car he drove to the massacre — had not been shot by police during his attack, something they said would have happened had he been Black.

On Sunday, however, Mr. Gramaglia rebutted this suggestion, saying that his officers always worked to de-escalate violent situations. “We’re not looking to shoot anyone,” he said, noting that Mr. Gendron had pointed the gun at himself, not police.

Mr. Gendron live-streamed his attack, the police said, capturing the images of chaos he caused with a camera affixed to his helmet. The video was broadcast on Twitch, a livestreaming site owned by Amazon that is popular with gamers, though the site took the channel offline almost immediately after the attack started. Still, images of the broadcast could still be found online; a snippet of the video of the shooting was viewed more than three million times on a site called Streamable before it was removed.

At a morning appearance at the True Bethel church, Ms. Hochul, a Democrat who is a Buffalo native, said she was angry at the violence that had shaken her hometown, calling the gunman “a coward.” But she also expressed deep frustration with “the social media platforms that allow this hatred to ferment and spread like a virus.”

When pressed on how she planned to confront such hate speech online, without impinging on First Amendment rights, Ms. Hochul noted that “hate speech is not protected” and said she would soon be calling meetings with social media companies.

“I assure you when I get back to Albany, their phones will ring,” she said.

Along with other Buffalo residents, Ms. Hochul stressed that she wanted the city to be known as a turning point in the nation’s string of gun tragedies.

“I want them to talk about Buffalo,” she said, “as the last place this ever happened.”

Christine Chung, Andy Newman, Ashley Southall, Ali Watkins, Emma Bubola, Chelsia Rose Marcius, Troy Closson, Mihir Zaveri, Dan Higgins, Chris Cameron, Kellen Browning, Nicholas Confessore, Grace Ashford and Adam Goldman contributed reporting.

Before the massacre, the gunman’s erratic behavior attracted attention.

Payton Gendron, a senior, said he wanted to commit a murder-suicide, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the matter.

He claimed to be joking, the official said. But the state police were summoned to investigate and took Mr. Gendron, then 17, into custody on June 8 under a state mental health law, police officials said Sunday.

He had a psychiatric evaluation in a hospital but was released within a couple of days, the officials said. Two weeks later, Mr. Gendron graduated and fell off investigators’ radar.

On Saturday, he resurfaced 200 miles away in Buffalo, where the authorities say he opened fire at a supermarket in a predominantly Black area, killing 10 people and wounding three others in one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent United States history.

After his rampage, Mr. Gendron put his gun to his neck. But two officers persuaded him to drop his weapon and surrender.

He was charged Saturday with first-degree murder, and as he awaited his fate in jail, investigators were sifting through his past to piece together how he transformed from a quiet student to an accused killer without drawing more serious scrutiny.

New York State has what is known as a red flag law, under which people found to be a danger can be forced to surrender their guns, but no one tried to invoke it against Mr. Gendron. The state police said he had not named a specific target in his threat to kill someone.

But the episode came after what former classmates said was a pattern of increasingly bizarre behavior by Mr. Gendron. Two former classmates said he showed up to class in hazmat gear after pandemic restrictions were lifted in 2020.

“He wore the entire suit, boots, gloves, everything,” Nathan Twitchell, 19, said as he stood on his porch in Binghamton, shaking his head. “Everyone was just staring at him.”

That was one of the few times students saw Mr. Gendron, said Cassaundra Williams, another student at the high school. Ms. Williams, 19, said Mr. Gendron favored online coursework even as his classmates returned to campus.

“He was always very quiet and never much said anything,” said Ms. Williams, who added that Mr. Gendron was “book smart” but had grown more reclusive over the years since she met him in elementary school.

“We were just so shocked. We can’t even wrap our heads around it still,” she said.

F.B.I. agents and other law officers gathered Sunday morning outside Mr. Gendron’s family home in Conklin, a town of about 5,000 people.

There was little movement at the light-blue, two-story house with black shutters and neatly trimmed shrubs, save for agents pacing the driveway. Three neighbors stood closely together down the block, arms folded. Some recalled watching Mr. Gendron play basketball in the driveway with his two brothers, and some even had attended his front-yard graduation party last year.

Mr. Gendron’s mother did not respond to a message left on Sunday afternoon. Nor did the lawyer who represented Mr. Gendron at his arraignment, Brian Parker.

Ms. Williams said the last time she had seen Mr. Gendron was at graduation. She said she was shocked when a friend texted her after the shooting Saturday to tell her that Mr. Gendron had been arrested.

“He was just a quiet, smart kid that I wouldn’t think would be able to do anything like what he did yesterday,” said Mr. Twitchell. “It just blows my mind.”

Kolton Gardner, 18, who attended middle school and high school with Mr. Gendron, described him as “definitely a little bit of an outcast.”

“He just wasn’t that social,” Mr. Gardner said. “I knew he had an interest in guns, but where we grew up that wasn’t uncommon. That’s just kind of the thing in rural New York, people like guns.”

Mr. Gendron’s fascination with guns went beyond the casual. Law enforcement officials said he plotted the attack over several months and posted a 180-page manifesto online explaining why he committed the shootings and describing his meticulous preparations. In it, he wrote extensively about the pros and cons of various firearms.

The document includes a question-and-answer section, charts of data that lend a pseudoscientific air and pages of racist and antisemitic memes — as well as his thoughts on cryptocurrency.

He wrote of his admiration for previous mass killers and said that he took as a particular inspiration the man responsible for a 2019 mosque massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand.

One of many unanswered questions posed by Mr. Gendron’s rampage is why his grim response about his post-graduation plans did not lead to further intervention beyond the mental-health exam.

Under New York State’s red flag law, enacted in 2019, anyone who believes that someone may be a threat to themselves or others can ask a judge to issue an “extreme risk protection order” that prevents the person from purchasing or possessing a firearm. The law is not used often.

The law enforcement official who had been briefed on the school project said that in New York, there are hundreds of school threats called in each year, and that in each case, authorities interview the students and their parents to determine whether students have actual access to guns. The authorities then try to make a reasoned call.

In any case, Mr. Gendron was not on any red-flag list when he entered Vintage Firearms in Endicott, N.Y., and bought the Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle that the police say he used in the shooting.

Robert Donald, the owner of the store, confirmed that his records showed he had sold the gun to Mr. Gendron, but said he did not remember the young man at all, even though he said he sells only a half-dozen or so of this type of gun in a year.

Mr. Donald, 75, who has owned the shop since 1993 and primarily sells collectible firearms, said he was shocked when federal investigators contacted him Saturday to inquire about Mr. Gendron, who Mr. Donald said had bought the gun within the last few months.

Mr. Donald said he did a background check on Mr. Gendron before he sold him the gun. The report showed nothing. “He didn’t stand out, because if he did, I would have never sold him the gun,” Mr. Donald said.

Mr. Gendron wrote that he modified the gun with his father’s power drill, using a parts kit that retails for $60. Mr. Donald said that when he sold Mr. Gendron the firearm, its design complied with state law banning military-style features.

“Even with all of those safety features on it — which is the only way I sell it — any gun can be easily modified if you really want to do it,” he said.

Christine Chung, Luke Vander Ploeg and Mark Walker contributed reporting.

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Officials call the Buffalo massacre the latest example of domestic terrorism.

Even the suspect embraced the label, writing online that he considered his attack an act of terrorism.

Scholars and law enforcement officials have warned in recent years of an increasing threat from white supremacists in the United States, saying it had surpassed the danger from violent Islamic extremists.

The government has made efforts to respond. Last year, the White House unveiled a strategy that called for hiring more domestic terror analysts, screening government employees for ties to hate groups and confronting the racism and bigotry that fuel such extremism. In January, the Justice Department said it was creating a domestic-terrorism unit.

But even as awareness of the threat from white supremacists and right-wing militia groups increases, efforts to target it have run into obstacles. Under President Donald J. Trump, Republicans pressured investigators to prioritize investigations into leftist movements like antifa, and they have resisted efforts to examine violence carried out by far-right groups, such as during the Capitol riot on Jan. 6 of last year.

One concern raised by Republicans, and by some Democrats, is that expanding the government’s power to combat domestic terrorism could lead to the persecution of people solely because of beliefs protected under the Constitution.

Last month, a House panel voted to advance the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, which would require the F.B.I., the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security to set up offices dedicated to investigating the phenomenon. Some Republicans who voted against the bill cited false claims that the Justice Department would target parents who speak out at school board meetings.

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New York, a state with relatively low levels of gun violence, witnesses yet another mass shooting.

The rate of mass gun killings put New York in the middle of the nation, according to one 2020 study that listed it as 26th for the number of people killed per capita in mass public shootings between 1976 and 2018.

Still, this year New York has seen at least seven mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive. They include an attack on a Brooklyn subway last month when a gunman shot 10 people, none fatally. The organization defines a mass shooting as having at least four victims shot or killed, not including the perpetrator.

Rates of gun violence in the United States surged in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, the C.D.C. said last week, with the gun homicide rate reaching the highest level since 1994.

While the causes remain unclear, researchers said stress associated with the pandemic and a surge in gun sales were likely to be factors. Poor communities suffered some of the greatest increases in gun homicides, with the toll falling heavily on Black men and women.

Classmates recall the suspect as ‘quiet’ and reclusive.

“Everyone was just staring at him,” he added.

But that was one of the few times students saw Mr. Gendron after in-person learning resumed, said 19-year-old Cassaundra Williams, another student at the high school. Ms. Williams said Mr. Gendron later resumed online coursework.

“He was always very quiet and never much said anything,” said Ms. Williams, who added that Mr. Gendron was book smart but grew more reclusive over the years since she first remembered meeting him in elementary school.

“We were just so shocked. We can’t even wrap our heads around it still,” she said.

Lucy Ramirez-Patterson, 18, of Kirkwood, said that Mr. Gendron was a loner at school. But they’d interacted at least once and the conversation felt off, she said.

“When I talked to him before I could just tell he would not look into my eyes. He was wandering around somewhere else,” Ms. Ramirez-Patterson said, adding that she is mixed race. “He did make me feel uncomfortable.”

Kolton Gardner, 18, of Conklin, who attended middle school and high school with Mr. Gendron, described him as “definitely a little bit of an outcast.”

“He just wasn’t that social,” Mr. Gardner said. “I knew he had an interest in guns, but where we grew up that wasn’t uncommon. That’s just kind of the thing in rural New York, people like guns.”

Jada Vanwert, a junior at Susquehanna Valley High School from Binghamton, said that she and Payton Gendron were close friends up until his graduation last year. She said she befriended him after seeing him eating alone at school.

“He was a really good kid, so sweet, kind. He was just an overall fun person to hang out with inside and outside of school,” said Ms. Vanwert, 17.

They’d often go to the pool together when it was hot, she said, and chat about their futures. He never talked about suicide or desires to shoot anybody, she added.

“He always talked about how he wanted to graduate from school, get a good career, move further on in his life,” Ms. Vanwert said.

She said she fell out of touch with Mr. Gendron when he graduated.

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New York’s churches confronted the racist massacre in Buffalo.

“We survived the gang era, the drug era. Now we’ve got to do this,” he said, referring to mass shootings.

Some of the most powerful politicians in New York — including Senator Chuck Schumer, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James — attended services at True Bethel Baptist Church in Buffalo. Several congregants said their relatives were hurt in the attack: an elderly mother shopping for groceries after visiting her husband in a nursing home, and a grandson who was shot in the neck.

Darius Pridgen, the church’s bishop, said he had read the suspect’s writings online and dismissed questions about his age and state of mind.

“People have said to me, ‘But don’t you still believe that he might have been suffering from a mental illness?’” he said. “You’ll have to excuse me. I don’t give a damn about his mental illness.”

Downstate in Harlem, gospel music poured out of church doors as worshipers arrived for services with the shooting weighing on their minds.

Standing outside Canaan Baptist Church of Christ on West 116th Street, Anthony Means, 52, lamented a toxic mix of cultural intolerance and gun violence. He said it gave him more reason to be concerned about a ruling from the Supreme Court this summer that could force New York to loosen restrictions on carrying guns in public.

“I just wonder what is that going to mean?” he said. “Will everyone just decide to pick up guns and resolve their issues in that way? I don’t know. It’s scary times, spooky scary.”

Two police counterterrorism officers stood guard on the sidewalk opposite the red doors leading to the sanctuary of Abyssinian Baptist Church on West 138th Street, where the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, is a member.

In the aftermath of the attack on Saturday, the Police Department said that it was shifting counterterrorism and patrol resources to houses of worship in communities of color.

Carol McHenry, 65, a hair stylist, said the police presence outside the church did not make her feel safer, because it would not last. She said she could not fathom the level of hatred that led to the attack.

“Why would anyone sit down and think about driving 200 miles to go kill people for no apparent reason?” she said. “I can’t even grasp that. I don’t understand.”

Charles Powell, a deacon at First Corinthian Baptist Church on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, said the shooting recalled the Charleston, South Carolina, church massacre, and it was of a piece with mass shootings in Colorado and Florida and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“It’s violence, period,” he said. “It’s much, much bigger than Buffalo.”

MichaelA.WalrondJr., the church’s senior pastor, had prepared to deliver a message on teenage suicide. But he said he felt compelled to address the shooting in Buffalo.

The racism that propelled the attack is woven into the fabric of the United States, he said. “Until we are honest about that, and honest about the cultural addiction to hate and the myth of racial superiority, we’ll constantly find ourselves revisiting these crises and asking the same questions,” he said.

“There are many who want to get to a place of healing and reconciliation, but there can be no healing or reconciliation unless there’s radical truth-telling,” he added.

Dan Higgins contributed reporting.

Liberals, blocked on gun control, call for a new domestic terror law after the shooting.

In response to the killings, the House would soon move to take up legislation that would “strengthen efforts to combat domestic terrorism,” she said in a statement.

Ms. Pelosi offered no specifics. But in April, Democrats on the House Judiciary passed a bill that would create permanent offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and FBI “to monitor, investigate and prosecute cases of domestic terrorism.” The proposal would also increase training of local police forces to detect, deter and investigate homegrown terrorism.

A nearly identical bill passed the House on a voice vote, without opposition, a year ago. This year, the measure passed over the objection of all 17 committee Republicans who argued that the measure could be misused to initiate investigations against conservatives for exercising their free speech rights.

The bill is likely to face an even steeper path in the evenly divided Senate, where 60 votes are needed necessary to pass legislation.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat who chairs the committee, said “Buffalo is a clarion call,” in an email. “The Republicans feel they owe something to the white nationalist, extremist, farthest right fringes of their party,” he added.

The domestic terrorism bill sponsored by Mr. Nadler is a much weaker version of a bill Democrats introduced in 2019, which would have created a new class of criminal domestic terrorism offenses to aid prosecutors in putting together cases against extremists.

That proposal drew fierce opposition from Republicans, and from the American Civil Liberties Union, which argued that the bill would have harmed communities of color by “unnecessarily” expanding “law enforcement authorities to target and discriminate against the very communities Congress is seeking to protect.”

Democrats’ prospects of getting some kind of domestic terrorism bill, ahead of the 2020 midterm elections — however slim — are far greater than advancing their gun control agenda, which includes passing universal background checks and limiting access to the kind of semiautomatic weapons of the type used by the Buffalo suspect.

“In the wake of this Buffalo shooting, it may be that we have to put a vote up in the Senate or in the House to show the American people where folks stand,” said Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, a gun control proponent, speaking on MSNBC on Sunday.

Democrats have already forced two failed votes in the Senate — one earlier this year on voting rights and one Wednesday to codify abortion rights.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who is not seeking reelection, proposed raising the age from purchasing long guns, now 18 in most states, to 21, the threshold for buying a handgun.

“Can we all at least agree we should raise the age to 21 for ARs”? he asked on Twitter, referring to AR-15s, the catchall name for semiautomatic rifles.

Even in rare instances there is bipartisan agreement to address an issue, Democrats have had to drop some restrictions on who can purchase guns.

In March, Congress renewed the Violence Against Women Act, a law designed to combat stalking, domestic violence and sexual assault, after Democrats agreed to ditch a provision that would have prevented any dating partner, not just spouses, who had been convicted of domestic violence from owning a gun.

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The suspect received a mental health evaluation after making threats last year the police said.

After that, he appears to have faded from the radar of law enforcement.

“There was nothing picked up on the State Police intelligence, nothing that was picked up on the F.B.I. intelligence,” Mr. Gramaglia said. “Nobody called in, nobody called any complaints.”

On the question of whether the suspect’s social media accounts had raised alarms, he said: “There’s a lot of people in this world that use social media.”

On Sunday, updates continued to trickle out in Buffalo, where the police and the F.B.I., as well as the mayor, governor and state attorney general, gathered to address reporters.

The police said that the suspect, who was identified as Payton Gendron, was apprehended with three weapons: a rifle, a shotgun and the AR-15-style weapon he used to carry out the attack. Law enforcement have executed one warrant on his car and are seeking others, they said. There is no evidence at this time that he acted with anyone else, they said.

John C. Garcia, the Erie County sheriff, confirmed that the suspect was being held on suicide watch, after slipping his gun underneath his chin yesterday before surrendering to the police.

And while he said that the suspect would be treated just like anyone else in the Erie County Holding Center, the sheriff struggled to stay neutral when describing him.

“I’m not going to mention this individual by name. He doesn’t deserve that. We should never mention his name,” he said, adding, “As far as we’re concerned, he is inmate control number 157103.”

Although the investigation is in its infancy, with many questions left unanswered, Mr. Gramaglia was clear on one point.

“The evidence that we have uncovered so far makes no mistake that this is an absolute racist hate crime. It will be prosecuted as a hate crime,” he said. “This is someone who has hate in their heart, soul and mind.”

New York’s laws on buying long guns are less restrictive than for handguns.

New York prohibits anyone under 21 from obtaining a handgun permit, but no permit is needed to buy a long gun. The state allows people to own long guns, such as rifles and shotguns, at age 16, and buy them at 18.

Pennsylvania allows New Yorkers to buy long guns if they are at least 18 and can pass a criminal background check. The firearms must comply with New York law.

The 2013 Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act, a state law, tightened the rules by implementing universal background checks and stricter definitions for assault weapons. The F.B.I. uses the National Instant Criminal Background Check System at the point of sale in New York. The owner of the New York gun store where the suspect bought his Bushmaster XM-15 said a check turned up nothing.

New York City has separate licensing regulations. A person buying rifles, shotguns and handguns needs a permit. In recent years, legislation has been proposed to bring the age requirement for long guns to 21.

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Washington officials condemn white supremacist ideology and its ties to the far right.

“What is clear is that we are seeing an epidemic of hate across our country that has been evidenced by acts of violence and intolerance,” she said. “We must call it out and condemn it. Racially motivated hate crimes or acts of violent extremism are harms against all of us.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said in a statement that the House would take up legislation that would “strengthen efforts to combat domestic terrorism,” though she did not specify what legislation.

“That’s what this is, domestic terrorism,” Ms. Pelosi said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” separately calling for passage of federal legislation to expand gun background checks, which she said was a “huge priority” for Democrats.

Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, also called the attack an “act of domestic terrorism by a racist, antisemitic white supremacist,” and called for the passage of “common-sense gun safety reforms.”

Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut and a champion of that legislation, said on MSNBC that “in the wake of this Buffalo shooting, it may be that we have to put a vote up in the Senate or in the House — show the American people where folks stand.”

But legislation to expand background checks and impose other safeguards for purchasing a gun has stalled in the evenly divided Senate, where 60 votes are needed to advance most legislation and Republicans remain opposed.

At least one Republican, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, called the shooting “a reminder of why we don’t play around with white nationalism.” Mr. Kinzinger, who is not running for re-election and has clashed with his party repeatedly after the Jan. 6 riot on Capitol Hill, added that “We= everyone (particularly the GOP).”

He singled out Representative Elise Stefanik, who represents a congressional district in upstate New York, as someone who “pushes white replacement theory,” referring to ads paid for by Ms. Stefanik’s campaign committee that echoed far-right commentary on replacement theory. (Ms. Stefanik on Saturday offered condolences to victims of the attack, calling it a “horrific loss of life.”)

Alex deGrasse, a senior adviser for Ms. Stefanik, said on Sunday that the congresswoman “has never advocated for any racist position or made a racist statement.”

He added that “the shooting was an act of evil, and the criminal should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Mr. Biden, arriving at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Sunday morning, said he had not yet spoken to the families of victims. He had said earlier that he was not sure if he would be able to visit Buffalo before a planned trip to Asia this week.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on Sunday that the shooting was an act of terrorism, but did not say whether the Biden administration would support a new federal law criminalizing domestic terrorism.

“We don’t know, obviously, all of the details that fit the legal definitions,” Mr. Buttigieg said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“What we know is somebody traveled a long distance with an AR-15 to hunt human beings, to hunt Black people. We need to make sure we root out that kind of hate.”

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‘I always knew my dad was brave,’ said the son of the security guard who was killed.

“I always knew my dad was brave,” said his son, Aaron Salter III, 29. “He was a hero.”

Mr. Salter and the gunman exchanged fire, but the gunman was wearing heavy body armor, and the bullet bounced off, Mark Poloncarz, the Erie County executive, said at a vigil near the store on Sunday, where he identified Mr. Salter as the guard.

The gunman fatally shot Mr. Salter and went on to kill six more people in the store.

“He’s a true hero, and we don’t know what he prevented. There could have been more victims if not for his actions,” Joseph Gramaglia, the Buffalo police commissioner, said of Mr. Salter, speaking in an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.”

Mr. Salter, 55, had spent decades as an officer with the Buffalo Police Department before retiring and taking a job as a security guard with the Tops franchise, his son said.

“He was on the police force for 30 years and nothing like this ever happened,” his son said. “He was just doing a security job, and that guy had to come in there and take all these innocent lives for no reason.”

Mr. Salter was featured several times in local news reports during his career in the department. He and a partner once chased down an arsonist, the Buffalo News reported.

In a separate instance described by the paper, Mr. Salter once faced down a burglary suspect who was armed with a shotgun.

Mr. Salter was a “car guy,” his son said. When he retired in 2018, he bought a 1967 Coupe DeVille Cadillac, which he fixed, polished and cleaned in his free time.

“He told me it was going to be mine one day,” his son said, “but I didn’t want it like this.”

Mr. Salter and his wife also had a camper, which they used to take their family on trips. They had three children, including one adopted daughter.

Aaron Salter III said that he had been planning to go to his parents’ house on Sunday to help his father put up a greenhouse for his mother.

“He told me he was going to call me today to tell me if I should come or not,” he said. “And now we are here.”

Mr. Poloncarz said the families of all 10 victims had been notified, and their names are expected to be officially released tomorrow.