Payton Gendron is apprehended after murdering 10 people in a mass shooting in Buffalo, America. Photos: Twitter via @lipstickalley and @sorryimsheri.

It was only last December that I wrote of Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman, and his family.

They were posing for a Christmas greeting. They were posing with in front of a Christmas tree. They were armed with enough artillery to invade a small country. They told Santa: Please bring more ammo. What jesters.

But it was not fun, it was not humorous. It was a link in the chain that is America and gun massacres. Thomas Massie and his family did not pull the trigger in the latest atrocity, that is, the recent Buffalo shooting in which 10 people died.

An 18-year-old white boy with hate in his heart did that. His name is Payton Grendon. He travelled from his home in New York more than 300 kilometres to kill black people. He didn’t know those he shot. They were mere objects of a poisoned mind.

He bought the gun legally.

He bought the gun legally.

Once more, he bought the gun legally.

The link in the chain was illustrated by Fred Guttenberg, the father of 14-year-old Jaime, who was shot and killed at a Florida high school in 2018.

Gutenberg has been reported saying: “We have a gun problem in America. The next person who wants to do this can very easily today, go acquire all the means to do it. We must deal with the reality of easy access to weapons. This is not an attack on gun owners. This is not an attack on the Second Amendment. It’s an attack on the reality [of] gun violence and we need to attack that problem.”

He also pointed to politicians, and conspiracy theorists for, in effect, fertilising the soil from which such evil flowers bloom.

“The problem is, you can’t pretend that we don’t have a problem with easy access for guns to those who intend harm,” he said.

“And we have these young people who, unfortunately, think they can solve issues this way. They can’t. To make it worse, you have young people, like this person, who live in a world of white supremacy, that is certainly motivated and quietly encouraged by some of the same people who are posting themselves with those photos.”

Gutenberg tweeted: “As I heard about this today (Buffalo), I could not stop thinking about the holiday photo of @RepThomasMassie and family last year. There are consequences.”

Words are not hollow vessels; ideas are not passing clouds. They can carry death. Grendon is a child of the internet’s dark side, taken into tunnels of vile extremist atmosphere that breathed in, without question, enters the bloodstream and turns a mind toxic.

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Like others, such as the Christchurch murderer Brenton Tarrant, this teenager had a manifesto in which he mimics the extremist nonsense of those who believe they are fighting for the future of civilisation.

It is here that theories flourish such as the great migration replacement theory, in which whites are going to be swamped, their communities diluted by others of non-pure blood unless a war is fought by like minds. It’s Hitler, in not so many words or deaths.

Grendon says he got “most of his ideas from the internet”. He certainly could not have got them from firsthand experience. The submersion in the crackpot was facilitated by the tacit, and at times overt, influence of right-wing politicians and extremist sections of the media that tells a kid a kid, “Go on, shoot the enemy among us. It is the right thing to do.”

So the right thing to do for Grendon was travel 300 kilometres, after you’ve researched an easy target of black people, a supermarket, make sure your assault rifle is loaded, and start shooting.

The New York Times reported his weapon was a Bushmaster XM-15, an assault weapon similar to an AR-15 (There are about five million AR-15s, and more than 700,000 machineguns in circulation in America).

He bought it at a store whose owner Robert Donald said he did a background check of Grendon and nothing caused alarm. “He didn’t stand out – because if he did, I would’ve never sold him the gun.”

Police and authorities have been quick to condemn the attack as racially motivated. But this would be no matter to Grendon, who wears his badge of white supremacist publicly. And after all, the deed is done.

A day or so after the attack, Grendon appeared in court. He pleaded not guilty.

In last December’s article, I included a reference to Ani DiFranco, the singer-songwriter. She is a native of Buffalo.

I wrote then: “More than 20 years ago, after the Columbine massacre in which 12 students and one teacher died, songwriter Ani Di Franco wrote ‘To the Teeth’.

Part of the lyric is:

The sun is setting on the century / and we are armed to the teeth / We’re all working together now / to make our lives mercifully brief. Every year now like Christmas / some boy gets the milk fed suburban blues / Reaches for the available arsenal / and saunters off to make the news.

Now, it seems, there is a more insidious thread running through America. These are not just boys, pissed off with the world. They see themselves as part of a greater, grander army; soldier martyrs for a cause that is at base nihilistic, racist and delusional.

How long will this be the never-ending story, the chorus on rotation?