US Mass Shootings: Joe Biden Blames 'Poison' of White Supremacist Ideology

"What happened here is simple and straightforward terrorism. Domestic terrorism," Biden said.

US President Joe Biden.

(Photo: Twitter/@POTUS)

United States President Joe Biden on Tuesday, 17 May, said that racism had become political and was the "poison" of the white supremacist ideology behind the US mass shootings at a Buffalo grocery store, a Harris County flea market, and at Laguna Woods Church, leaving a total of 13 people dead and multiple injured.

While speaking in New York State's Buffalo, where a teen has been accused of killing 10 Black people in a supermarket, Biden said, "What happened here is simple and straightforward terrorism. Domestic terrorism," news agency AFP reported.

"White supremacy is a poison running through our body politic and it's been allowed to fester right in front of our eyes," Biden said, as he condemned "those who spread the lie for power, for political gain and for profit."

Commenting on the 18-year old accused, Payton Gendron, who referred to "replacement theory," a 'plot' to apparently overwhelm the white population with non-white immigrants, Biden said that it was "a hate that through the media and politics (and) the internet has radicalised angry, alienated, lost and isolated individuals into falsely believing that they will be replaced – that's the word, replaced – by 'the other'."

"We need to say as clearly and forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America," he continued.

Earlier, Biden had said that the Buffalo shooting was a racially motivated hate crime, which was "abhorrent to the very fabric of this nation."

"Any act of domestic terrorism, including an act perpetrated in the name of a repugnant white nationalist ideology, is antithetical to everything we stand for in America. Hate must have no safe harbor. We must do everything in our power to end hate-fuelled domestic terrorism," Biden added.

The Background

Two mass shootings occurred a day after the Buffalo shooting that claimed 10 lives.

While one person was killed and four others were critically injured near a Los Angeles church in the United States on Sunday, another shooting claimed two lives and left multiple people injured at a Harris County flea market the same day in Texas.

One person was apprehended and his weapon was seized from the church shooting and another was arrested in the flea market incident, from whom two pistols were recovered.

(With inputs from AFP.)