The Buffalo mass shooting comes amid rise in racial violence in US

The story is, by now, nauseatingly familiar. From Charleston to El Paso, from Pittsburgh to San Diego, and from Christchurch, New Zealand, to the latest scene of horror in Buffalo, New York, each of these mass shootings is stitched with one common thread: white supremacy.

The perpetrator appears to be a radicalized, lone white gunman, filled with racial hatred fueled by extremist theory widely available on the internet, who descended on a predominantly Black community in Buffalo, New York, heavily armed and determined to kill as many people as he could.

The suspect, Payton Gendron, 18, is said to have etched a racial insult onto the barrel of his assault rifle before he live streamed himself gunning down grocery shoppers, supermarket staff and a security guard.

Joe Biden, scores of American politicians, and community and civil rights leaders, including the Rev Al Sharpton, were quick to express their outrage, calling for more to be done to tackle the rise in hate-based crime in the US.

The parallels of Buffalo are significant not only to the August 2019 murder of 21 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, but also to countless other shootings involving a radicalized, solitary attacker.

Four years earlier, an attack on a Black community church by a self-confessed white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina, left nine dead.

And a similar shooting occurred at a synagogue in San Diego, California, in April 2019, when one person died and several others were wounded by a 19-year-old who also posted messages of racial hatred to 8chan.

The San Diego killer claimed he was motivated by attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, a month earlier in which a white supremacist murdered 51 Muslims. Investigators there quickly established the killer had been radicalized online, had posted his own manifesto of hate and live streamed the killings.

To Sharpton, the veteran civil rights activist and television host, the latest attack in Buffalo is an urgent call to action.