Update 51 - Payton Gendron - Profile of a Loser

I was as horrified as anyone else living in buffalo in the spring of 2022 when we heard that someone had shot up one of our local Tops supermarket. Mass shootings are now a regular American past time, more part of our identity than baseball in 2025. I was nervous about school shooters in high school at the end of the 2000’s, I can’t imagine the stress kids experience in high school currently. Technology advances faster than the old folk can catch on to, and everything feels like the end of the world when you’re a kid.

The shooter I’m writing about today was 18 at the time when he shot 13 people, killing 10 of them. All those murdered were black, and the shooter, Payton Gendron, was at that location to deliberately kill black people and further inconvenience their community in the wake of his homicidal bitch-fit.

Gendron’s approach to the Tops, as well as the start of the shooting, were streamed live on twitch for 13 minutes and 31 seconds before the stream was taken down. At one point in the video, you can see Gendron train his rifle on a white man who’d been (apparently inadvertently) shot in the leg. Gendron says “sorry” and moves further into the store, where he shoots and kills four more people.

Gendron was confronted by police and put a sidearm to his neck. The officers did what they were trained to do and convinced Gendron to put the gun down. Gendron, being a coward who didn’t like the idea of being shot nearly as much as he liked the idea of shooting unarmed black people, was taken into custody immediately.

The east side of Buffalo is predominantly black and much of it includes lower income households. Gendron knew this, and knew that that particular grocery store was the only one accessible to many of the people who lived there. Tops and other organizations had to work hard to help make sure the residents of that neighborhood still had access to food in the two months after the shooting when the store was closed down.

I work next to the holding center downtown. I remember thinking the day after the shooting how lovely it would be if someone dragged Gendron out and beat him to death over several hours in the middle of the street. I know many shared the same sentiment, and that many cops would be sorely tempted to step aside if a mob came after the shooter in his cell. But there was no mob, no explosive revenge killing, only hurt and anger at what this stupid hick had done. It’s important to note that Gendron was from 200 miles away, belonging to some poor town that should have swallowed him up. He was not one of ours. He drove 200 miles, did recon, and killed ten of our neighbors for- what reason? The same old boring story.

It was so cliche I remember being further angered. His manifesto was a rambling patch-work of previous white-supremacist’s writings, and largely plagiarized. Payton Gendron was such a big-brain, 4th-dimensional thinker, that he was radicalized by 4chan of all places in the year of our lord 2022. His manifesto was a bad stitch-work of half formed conspiracy theories. He was a supporter of the great replacement theory. Being that he believed himself a warrior for the “white race”, this was his great motivation for targeting a black community, for shooting 13 strangers and leaving another scar on the city’s history.

When brought before the court Gendron pleaded not guilty, not because he didn’t believe in his own master-race bullshit, but because he wished for a chance at a reduced sentence through his right to trial. In February of 2023, the incel was sentenced to 11 life sentences by the state. The federal case has yet to be concluded at time of writing.

This creeping obsession many people have with national or ethnic purity is cancerous. Payton Gendron was 18 years old when he took ten lives for a philosophy espoused by NEET creeps throughout the internet- that there’s some kind of genocide against white people, a global conspiracy by all that are other. He’d started college for a civil engineering program before dropping out and deciding to “take one for the home team”. I’ve never met anyone who would thank him.

There are many articles going up today about the impact of Gendron’s actions and the way the people of Buffalo have come together in the wake of the horror. I didn’t want to do that today. I wanted to voice the anger I and many others still feel towards this idiot kid who thought himself a man. I wanted to voice the anger that this will happen again, and those we elect to represent our best interests will let it happen again. The anger comes from heartbreak. Payton Gendron was a kid, until he decided to come here and pull that trigger. Now he’s a loser who no one will miss.