Biden denounces white supremacy after Buffalo mass shooting

U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday denounced white supremacy in a visit to the city of Buffalo in New York, where a gunman killed 10 people and injured three others, 11 of them African Americans.

"White supremacy is a poison running through our body politic," Biden said. "We need to say as clearly and forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America."

Payton Gendron, an 18-year-old white man, opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo on Saturday. He was alleged to have been motivated by a far-right conspiracy theory that white people are at risk of being replaced by immigrants and people of color. The massacre is being investigated as a racially motivated hate crime.

"What happened here is simple and straightforward: Terrorism. Terrorism. Domestic terrorism," Biden said. "Violence inflicted in the service of hate and the vicious thirst for power that defines one group of people being inherently inferior to any other group."

The Buffalo attack was the deadliest mass shooting in the United States so far in 2022 and one of at least 202 such incidents -- defined as one in which four or more people were injured or killed -- through mid-May, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

More than 29,000 people have either been killed or injured in gun violence-related incidents across the country since the start of the year, the nonprofit organization's data also showed.

Many Americans believe that gun violence in the country has much to do with a high number of firearms in private hands and easy access to lethal weapons.

Licensed gun makers in the United States built 11.3 million firearms in 2020, a 187 percent increase over the number they made in 2000, according to a report released by the Justice Department on Tuesday.

"We can only address the current rise in violence if we have the best available information and use the most effective tools and research to fuel our efforts," U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement.

"This report is an important step in that direction," Monaco vowed. "The Department will continue to gather the data necessary to tailor our approach at the most significant drivers of gun violence and take shooters off the streets."