![]() ![]() Pennsylvania Guns & Ammo, where Gendron bought a shotgun, was open when I called. Vintage Firearms temporarily closed, and its owner, Robert Donald, became the subject of a torrent of criticism on social media. He ultimately didn’t buy the gun from Farzad, but he did buy one from Vintage Firearms, a few blocks away. ![]() Farzad recalled that, the last time Gendron visited All Star Pawn Shop, he had looked at an AR-15-type rifle. Police say that Gendron had an AR-15-type rifle, a shotgun, and a bolt-action rifle with him in Buffalo. “If he had bought the gun from me and mowed down those poor people,” he said, “I would not be able to go to work.” He went silent on the line for a few seconds. “He mostly bought coins.” On Sunday, after seeing Gendron’s picture in the news, Farzad had trouble believing it was the same man who had come to his store so frequently. “He has been here many times,” Farzad said. Guns are around eighty per cent of his business, but his inventory includes everything from laptops to guitars to collectible coins. He has a wife and three children, and he opened up his pawnshop, in Endicott, in 2012, after previously running a restaurant in the same space. He was born in Iran, and he came to America in 1979, when he was eighteen years old. ![]() On Monday afternoon, I reached Mohammad, the owner of All Star Pawn Shop. A few spent a little while on the phone, telling me about their interactions with him. Several others hung up as soon as I mentioned Gendron’s name. Several people who answered acknowledged that Gendron had been a customer. This week, I called around to the stores that Gendron listed on Discord. I mean come on bro you’re jew is showing.” He’s quite a nice guy.” Meanwhile: “Mohammad from All Star Pawn Shop seems to like to ask for the maximum amount of money on everything. . . . Describing his interactions with someone working at Vintage Firearms, in Endicott: “He was smiling, like he wasn’t completely disgusted with my presence.” Later: “I like the guy at Vintage Firearms. In addition to detailing merchandise and prices about guns and ammunition, Gendron often wrote on Discord about the various clerks and store owners he encountered, offering his opinions of them, and sometimes even imagining what they made of him. He invited other Discord users to read the posts only a few minutes before the shooting-around the same time that he published a hundred-and-eighty-page manifesto online. Gendron apparently wrote his Discord posts as a kind of private running diary. Then I went to Pennsylvania guns and ammo and checked them out, has a nice NY-safe diamondback tactical AR-15.” Doesn’t have much in the sense of fun things that could cause a lot of damage in short periods of time. Then I went to Vintage Firearms and bought some 2 boxes of some old 12 gauge game ammo, priced at 50 shells for $20. “Went to McLain’s and finger-fucked some of his guns, had a NY-safe AR with detachable magazines for $1150 and a Yugoslavian SKS for $775. “I went to many stores after my dermatology appointment today,” Gendron wrote, this past December. Gendron’s Discord posts, which recount the trips he made to various gun stores, big-box retailers, and pawnshops, show how a mass murderer was able to navigate those strictures. New York has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. (“Buffalo has ~ 10% higher black population, that is the place I will go,” he posted on Discord, a chat app.) But he didn’t have to go far from Conklin to acquire his weapons and gear, which he purchased around southwestern New York and northern Pennsylvania. He targeted Buffalo, and Tops specifically, because his goal was to kill Black people. Gendron, who is eighteen and white, is from Conklin, New York, a town near the Pennsylvania border, about two hundred miles away from Buffalo. In the months leading up to the racist shooting at a Tops Friendly Market, in Buffalo, which left ten people dead and three others wounded, Payton Gendron, the alleged shooter, assembled a small arsenal.
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