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The Buffalo Shooter, Stochastic Terrorism, and How to Counter It  (Todd Morley, Small Wars Journal)
On March 15th, 2022, 18-year-old Payton Gendron walked into a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, NY and opened fire on innocent civilians. A calculated and premeditated attack, typical of the shootings that have become tragically routine across the United States. Unlike most, this particular attack was livestreamed on the streaming platform Twitch to a small audience of Gendron’s friends. This is not the first instance of a shooting broadcast for entertainment, but this recent example belies a disturbing trend. Gendron uploaded hundreds of pages of material to the 8chan and 4chan online message boards prior to the attack, including a self-described manifesto outlining the rationale for his attack. These documents show that Gendron drew a significant amount of inspiration from the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand – his manifesto explicitly states that seeing the impact of that attack was what convinced him to begin planning his own.

Even After Shootings, Experts Warn Against Cellphones in Schools  (Heather Kelly, Washington Post)
Students in Texas called 911 from their elementary school, but will more phones in classrooms make children safer?

Will More Countries Want Nuclear Weapons After the War in Ukraine?  (Joshua Keating, Grid)
From the Middle East to East Asia, nuclear crises loom.

Racist and Violent Ideas Jump from Web’s Fringes to Mainstream Sites  (Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson, New York Times)
On March 30, the young man accused of the mass shooting at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo surfed through a smorgasbord of racist and antisemitic websites online. On BitChute, a video sharing site known for hosting right-wing extremism, he listened to a lecture on the decline of the American middle class by a Finnish extremist. On YouTube he found a lurid video of a car driving through Black neighborhoods in Detroit. Over the course of the week that followed, his online writing shows, he lingered in furtive chat rooms on Reddit and 4chan but also read articles on race in HuffPost and Medium. He watched local television news reports of gruesome crimes. He toggled between “documentaries” on extremist websites and gun tutorials on YouTube. The young man, who was indicted by a grand jury last week, has been portrayed by the authorities and some media outlets as a troubled outcast who acted alone when he killed 10 Black people in the grocery store and wounded three more. In fact, he dwelled in numerous online communities where he and others consumed and shared racist and violent content. As the number of mass shootings escalates, experts say many of the disturbing ideas that fuel the atrocities are no longer relegated to a handful of tricky-to-find dark corners of the web.

Our Narrative of Mass Shootings Is Killing Us  (Elliot Ackerman, The Atlantic)
After the July 2016 Bastille Day attacks in Nice,Le Monde announced that it would “no longer publish photographs of the perpetrators of killings, to avoid the potential effect of posthumous glorification.”
No American-media consensus exists on how to cover mass shooters. Is the French approach not worth considering? Although some American newsrooms avoid republishing the images and names of shooters, many others continue to do so. In a study on mass shootings and media contagion, Jennifer Johnston, a psychology professor at Western New Mexico University, found that “identification with prior mass shooters made famous by extensive media coverage … is a more powerful push toward violence than mental health status or even access to guns.” A heightened awareness of the narratives we apply to mass shootings needs to be considered as a tool to combat this phenomenon, alongside attention to mental health and gun control. Murderous rage is not unique to America, but the expression of that rage is culturally determined, and so requires cultural countermeasures.
A sickness is sweeping our land; one of its symptoms is these shootings. A certain subset of young men is trying to bring meaning to their lives through gun violence. Stories are where people have always gone to find meaning. We need to tell a different story; the current one is killing us.