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Hochul Vows to Crack Down on Extremist Acts of Violence in New York

Gov. Kathy Hochul issued orders to strengthen the state’s “red-flag” law and create new units to target violent extremism online, following the Buffalo shooting that left 10 dead.

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Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York issued orders to strengthen the state’s “red-flag” gun law and target violent extremism online in the wake of a racist mass shooting that left 10 people dead in Buffalo.CreditCredit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

Days after a deadly mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, Gov. Kathy Hochul on Wednesday took a series of aggressive steps to strengthen New York’s gun laws and to investigate the social media platforms where the suspected gunman was radicalized and where the police say he streamed his racist attack.

The measures included the creation of a new unit, led by the State Police, to track violent extremism online, and a directive requiring the State Police to use New York's so-called red-flag law to seek emergency orders to seize weapons from people who are believed to pose a threat to themselves or others.

Ms. Hochul also asked the state attorney general, Letitia James, to investigate the role of several online platforms — including Discord, a chat application — where the suspect posted racist writings before the Saturday afternoon massacre.

Like other mass shootings in the United States, the attack in Buffalo has rekindled a debate over mental health, white supremacy and access to guns, while prompting calls, often unheeded, for changes to federal law.

Ms. Hochul emphasized that she was taking concrete steps in response to the attack, which left 10 people dead in a largely Black neighborhood, to toughen state laws that are already among the strictest in the nation.

“This is white supremacy in this nation at its worst,” the governor said at a news conference at her Manhattan office. “It’s infecting our society, it’s infecting our nation and now it’s taken members of our family away.”

The man charged in the killings, Payton Gendron, specifically targeted Black people in the attack, traveling some 200 miles from his home in the Southern Tier town of Conklin, N.Y., to find a place with a large Black population, according to the authorities.

In his online posts, Mr. Gendron, 18, referred repeatedly to replacement theory, which posits a nefarious plot to “replace” white people with people of color. All 10 of those killed in the Buffalo attack were Black, making it one of the worst racist mass shootings in recent American history.

In a letter to Ms. James, the governor asked the attorney general to “investigate the specific online platforms that were used to broadcast and amplify the acts and intentions” of the suspect.

Such an inquiry could involve issuing subpoenas to compel witness testimony and asking companies to preserve documents related to Mr. Gendron’s activities, which, the police say, included livestreaming the attack on the Amazon-owned site Twitch. The company quickly took down his channel, but snippets of his video continued to circulate on the internet.

Ms. Hochul’s request to Ms. James also specifically mentioned 4chan and 8chan, web forums where some message boards are filled with the types of racist and antisemitic messages that animated Mr. Gendron. In a personal diary he kept on Discord, he claimed that “his current beliefs” came from 4chan, which he said he had started to browse early in the pandemic.

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The suspected gunman deliberately sought a Black neighborhood, traveling hours to the Tops supermarket in east Buffalo.Credit...Malik Rainey for The New York Times

Ms. James said in a statement that her office was taking “serious action to investigate these companies for their roles in this attack.”

“Time and time again, we have seen the real-world devastation that is borne of these dangerous and hateful platforms,” she said in the statement. “And we are doing everything in our power to shine a spotlight on this alarming behavior and take action to ensure it never happens again.”

On Monday, it was revealed that Mr. Gendron had easily sidestepped New York’s three-year-old “red-flag law” to buy an assault-style weapon in January despite being held for a mental health evaluation last year after suggesting he wanted to commit a “murder-suicide.”

When he was evaluated, Mr. Gendron told the authorities that his “murder-suicide” statement — made in response to a question on a school project — was a joke. He was released, and no red-flag order was issued. He later bought a semiautomatic rifle, and posted on Discord that he had lied about his remark being in jest.

“That is the reason I believe I am still able to purchase guns,” he wrote. “It was not a joke, I wrote that down because that’s what I was planning to do.”

On Tuesday, President Biden visited Buffalo to console families and express support for stronger gun federal laws, although he acknowledged that passing such laws would be “very difficult” given the firm opposition among many congressional Republicans.

In New York, Ms. Hochul’s actions on the red-flag law, taken via executive order, may create a potentially daunting task for the State Police, considering that hundreds of school threats are called in every year.

The state’s red-flag law already allows a number of entities, including school administrators, parents and law enforcement authorities, to seek a judicial order — known as an “extreme-risk protection order” — to remove weapons from those they believe to be dangerous.

Kevin P. Bruen, the State Police superintendent, said that New York troopers were well acquainted with the law and had already sought roughly 300 red-flag orders.

“We’re going to get it done,” he said. “When the governor asks the State Police to do something, we’re going to do it.”

Overall, only about 600 such orders have been issued since the law took effect in 2019, according to the State Office of Court Administration.

“As with any public health law, just passing the law isn’t necessarily going to do anything if the people who know about it are unaware of the option,” said Jeffrey W. Swanson, a professor at Duke University who works with the law school’s Center for Firearms Law and studies red-flag measures.

Professor Swanson said that if he were adopting the measure, he would call for a “systematic, administratively driven effort to not only teach people about it, but incorporate it and make a routine of it.”

According to law enforcement officials and his own online diary, Mr. Gendron, who has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder charges, scouted Buffalo’s East Side to review potential sites for the massacre. On Saturday, the authorities said, he opened fire outside a Tops supermarket, then entered the store and continued to shoot shoppers and workers before eventually surrendering to the police.

On Wednesday, Ms. Hochul, a first-term Democrat who is seeking re-election this year, also urged the Legislature, which is controlled by her fellow Democrats, to pass additional gun safety laws, some of which were already under consideration even before the Buffalo shooting.

Ms. Hochul called specifically for legislation that would require the so-called microstamping of semiautomatic pistols as a way of helping law enforcement officers trace cartridge cases found at crime scenes to the gun that discharged them. Legislation requiring microstamping, which California passed in 2007 over the fierce opposition of gun makers, has long been discussed in Albany, with bills introduced since at least 2009.

The governor, who is from the Buffalo area, has repeatedly expressed concern about the spread of hate speech online, describing it as “a virus” and condemning “social media platforms where this hate can be spewed.”

About a half-hour before the attack, Mr. Gendron invited 15 people to view his online diary, a person with knowledge of the matter said Wednesday. None of the people appear to have alerted the authorities. In the diary, Mr. Gendron had also frequently posted pictures of himself posing with the gear and the gun he used to carry out the attack, as well as detailed plans — including hand-drawn maps — for the assault.

The initial attack, he wrote, was meant to be the first of several in a larger massacre in which he planned to kill as many Black people as possible. He even went so far as to tally the number of Black people on the street in a preparatory trip to the city, and he dismissed other cities he had considered targeting at an earlier, colder time of the year, when pedestrians might be so bundled up that it would be difficult to determine their race.

In her remarks, Ms. Hochul said she hoped that the Saturday shooting would be a “wake-up call” for the country, mentioning earlier gun violence in Parkland, Fla., and Sandy Hook, Conn., and white supremacist attackers in Charleston, S.C., Pittsburgh and El Paso.

Ms. Hochul said she didn’t want Buffalo to “ever be on that list” of cities, but rather for it to be where “they did something.”

“We’re doing something,” she said. “We’re doing something right now.”

Jesse McKinley is a Metro correspondent for The Times, with an emphasis on coverage of upstate New York. He previously served as bureau chief in Albany and San Francisco, as well as stints as a feature writer, theater columnist and Broadway reporter for the Culture desk. More about Jesse McKinley

Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney's office, state criminal courts in Manhattan and New York City's jails.

During his time on Metro, Mr. Bromwich has covered investigations into former president Donald J. Trump and his family business, the fall of New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the crisis at the jail complex on Rikers Island, among other topics. More about Jonah E. Bromwich

Luis Ferré-Sadurní is the Albany bureau chief and covers New York State politics. He joined The Times in 2017 and previously wrote about housing for the Metro desk. He is originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico. More about Luis Ferré-Sadurní

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: Hochul Vows Crackdown on Extremist Acts of Violence in New York. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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