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Was the Buffalo Shooter A Furry?

Content Warning: Mass shooting, Conspiracy Theory weirdos, homophobia, transphobia, and all sorts of bigotry. Basically if you have any triggers at all, definitely sit this one out.


This past weekend, a man drove to Buffalo, NY and shot 13 people in a supermarket, killing 10. In response to this tragedy, idiot conspiracy theorists have decided to pin the actions of this abhorrent murderer on anything they can deflect to. Video games were their immediate reflex, naturally, but they also decided to blame furries.

Maybe there’s a reason you’re polling 7th in the primary, Kandiss.

This is worse than merely just trying to deflect blame. Conservatives have recently taken to calling LGBT people “groomers” in order to stoke the exact kind of violence that occurred in Buffalo against LGBT folks. Here’s another lie that they’re spreading at the moment:

The reason I’m sharing this reprehensible content isn’t to give it an uncritical platform. It’s important that everybody understand exactly what’s happening here, and why it’s likely to result in even more violence directed at minorities, due to a process called stochastic terrorism.

The Buffalo Shooter’s Real Motives

The Buffalo Shooter was an avid believer in a racist conspiracy theory called “The Great Replacement”. This used to be a fringe conspiracy theory that only the wackiest of right-wing wackjobs would believe, but Tucker Carlson and FOX News have been giving it a lot of airtime, so it’s become a mainstream conspiracy theory in recent years.

There is, however, no specific link to FOX News in the shooter’s 180-page manifesto.

Based on the all of the information we have available today, including the fucker’s manifesto, the Buffalo shooter was motivated by a racist conspiracy theory and sought to kill racial minorities that he perceived as a threat to a white majority in America.

If you’re looking for “the truth” about the shooter’s motives, check the links above.

I’ve also read through the entire manifesto, and accompanying Discord server logs, and did not discover any references to Furry culture, but there was this (colors inverted for the sake of being legible on my blog’s theme):

The “14 words” used by white supremacists.

What is Stochastic Terrorism?

Stochastic Terrorism is the system that creates so-called “lone wolf attacks”.

It’s abundantly clear that the Buffalo shooting was an example of Stochastic Terrorism. Racists and right-wing media outlets claim there’s a conspiracy to erase white people from the American population–usually riding the coattails of the anti-woman political movement seeking to criminalize abortion–and then several people are murdered in broad daylight by someone who cites this belief in his manifesto for his actions.

But what’s likely to evade detection is conservatives’ response to this act is the genesis of more stochastic terrorism. Here are some of the comments from the Telegram channels above.

The same narratives espoused by furry haters everywhere rear their ugly heads again! No surprises there.

So here’s the deal: The people involved in these screenshots are trying to do two things at the same time.

  1. They’re trying to deflect attention from the actual root causes, because if they were addressed, it would negatively impact their recruitment pipeline.
  2. They’re trying to stir up resentment towards a predominantly LGBTQ+ community in the hopes that furries will be the victims of the next act of stochastic terrorism.

This isn’t a clever strategy that someone ordered them to do. There’s no conspiracy underneath it all. Instead, it’s a collusion of self-interest and acquired habits from years of deflecting blame from the actual causes of lone-wolf attacks toward irrelevant scapegoats.

Remember the Columbine High School shooting in 1999? And how the media ran with the “bullying” narrative? They weren’t victims of bullying, they were white supremacists that loved Hitler! They chose April 20 for the attack because it was Adolf Hitler’s birthday. It isn’t subtle, it isn’t hidden.

They tell on themselves and then morons choose to blame someone more convenient, and even dumber morons fall for it, and then people surrounded by self-deluded idiots cultivate a distorted worldview that leads them to believe that the only solution for such outrageous conditions is to murder a bunch of innocent people, and the wheel continues to spin.

This is the playbook of white supremacists in America. It’s the same playbook they’ve used for decades, and they’re going to keep employing it until a better tactic comes along or we all grow wiser to their game.

Anyone who believes that furries were at all responsible for this shooting is either malicious, profoundly misled, or both.

In the meantime, all we have is small catharsis in response to repeated attempts to deflect blame and endanger our lives.

But The Shooter Had Furry Porn On His Phone During the Live Stream!

That doesn’t actually mean anything, though.

Someone could’ve easily sent him that link as a prank and/or Discord shitpost and that would explain why it was on stream briefly, for example.

There’s no additional context or evidence available to suggest the Buffalo shooter was actively involved in the furry fandom.

There has been one shooting perpetrated by a furry before: Ben Smith (Polybun) was a right-wing furry.

Whenever a furry is outed for doing something terrible, I always hear about it from other furries (and furry-adjacent people), usually accompanied by horror stories.

Archive

Naturally, nobody came forward with an, “Oh, that guy, everyone knew to avoid him” anecdote with this Buffalo shooter. However, absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.

Primary Sources from the New York Furry Community

To address any remote possibility of overlooking something, I asked furries in New York if they ever met the guy.

@CJ_theHusky says “no idea”

Tantroo McNally says:

If he’s in the fandom, I never saw them. It’s kind of like seeing a sports logo and then trying to blame baseball on the murders honestly

Fayroe says:

While I may not be a participant in Furry I’m very much an observer. I believe the manifesto was also posted on a chan board. The sniper in DC streamed to 4chan as well, this kid was probably too dumb to figure out how so they chose twitch.

Really pulling at straws here on this one. The furs I knew from Binghamton claimed how racist and transphobic the town was. You are getting close to one of those coal mining town areas by the PA border.

Isn’t there still furry Friday on 4chan /b/

The other furries I’ve talked to from New York are similarly unaware of this person, but wanted to remain anonymous.

Open offer: If any furries believe the shooter was involved in the furry community in another state, or attended furry conventions, or was more deeply involved in any way beyond “existed on a Discord server in which someone posted a pornographic furry meme”, please get in touch.

The Obvious Conclusion

The evidence in favor of the Buffalo shooter being a right-wing extremist motivated by the “great replacement” conspiracy theory is staggering. It’s very obvious what he believed and why he murdered so many people.

The evidence in favor of the Buffalo shooter being a furry is basically zero.

A furry meme existing on his phone’s screen, without any context, in passing for a few frames during the livestream of the shooting doesn’t tell us anything. Nobody in the furry fandom knew this guy, either.

It’s pretty fucking clear what the truth is, and only someone deeply motivated to lie would believe otherwise.



This post first appeared on Dhole Moments - Software, Security, Cryptography, And The Furry Fandom, please read the originial post: here

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Was the Buffalo Shooter A Furry?

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