I’ve covered many US mass shootings since 2022. There’s one thing I’ll never understand

This article is part of our Behind the Headlines series, where Age reporters reveal unforgettable moments in their careers.See all 10 stories.

Sometimes, in this job, it’s easier to take a stranger’s hand and let them cry on your shoulder than it is to make sense of a senseless tragedy.

This is something I discovered a few years ago when I covered my first mass shooting as North America correspondent for this masthead. Sadly, it would not be my last.

It was a Saturday afternoon in May 2022 when news emerged that an 18-year-old gunman had opened fire at a popular supermarket in a black neighbourhood in Buffalo, New York.

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden visiting the scene of the Buffalo mass shooting in May 2022.Credit: AP

Inspired by New Zealand’s Christchurch massacre, Payton Gendron arrived at the Tops Friendly store about 2.30pm that day armed with an AR-15 assault rifle and a sole purpose: to kill black people and livestream the attack on the internet.

In a manifesto posted before his rampage, Gendron invoked the idea that white Americans were at risk of being “replaced” by people of colour, an ideology known as “great replacement theory”, regularly pushed by Fox TV host Tucker Carlson.

He specifically name-checked the Christchurch murderer – an Australian far-right extremist who livestreamed his racism-fuelled massacre at two New Zealand mosques in 2019 – as the person who had done the most to radicalise him.

This fact alone made the Buffalo mass shooting, the 128th to take place in the US that year, particularly “newsworthy” for our readers. After filing an analysis and briefing my editor, I packed my travel bag and boarded a flight from Washington to upstate New York.

Covering grief after a mass shooting can be challenging for reporters, who must balance the need for public information with extreme sensitivity to those affected.

Each job involves the delicate task of telling the victims’ stories quickly and accurately, while respecting the raw emotions of families and communities that are heartbroken and shattered by the loss of innocent lives.

Sometimes people are willing to talk about what they saw, who they knew, or how they felt about the fact another US mass shooting had taken place, years after the Sandy Hook massacre when many of the nation’s politicians promised genuine gun reform.

But other times, they’re still in shock and too devastated to speak, or view you as an intruder in their anguish – and who could blame them?

By the time I arrived on the scene in Buffalo, the pain was palpable.

Yellow police tape cordoned off the site where 10 black people had been slain. Bouquets and candles lined the streets in honour of the victims: the father who had gone to the grocery store to buy a birthday cake for his three-year-old son; the retired police officer who worked as a security guard at the supermarket to keep his community safe; the devoted parishioner who sang in the church choir and cared for her grandkids.

Grieving residents of the tight-knit neighbourhood milled the streets, struggling to understand how someone could be so consumed with racial hate that he travelled hours from his hometown near the Pennsylvania border to murder strangers simply based on the colour of their skin.

Among those residents was Cecilia Williams, who I found placing flowers at a makeshift memorial in honour of the victims.

After introducing myself and asking if she’d care to talk, Williams placed her hand in mine and broke down in tears.

“Nothing as tragic as this has ever happened here before,” she told me, overcome with emotion.

“I live right down the street and I thought there was a bomb or something going off: boom, boom, boom. It was terrible.

“But this was a terrorist act – he planned to come here – so how are you going to shut down people like that? They want a white America and it’s so sad that we can’t all just get along. All this hate. For what?”

I’ve spent a lot of time in my career dealing with trauma, cognisant of the fact that repeated exposure can also take an emotional toll on journalists, often in the form of burnout or secondary trauma.

Scenes of devastation in Buffalo after the 2022 shooting.Credit: AP

As reporters in The Age’s investigative unit, my colleagues Chris Vedelago, Debbie Cuthbertson and I spent months talking to survivors of clergy sex abuse to expose a network of paedophile rings in the Catholic Church: priests and religious brothers who colluded with each other to abuse young boys. Sometimes, they’d even share their victims.

By the end of the project, which involved trawling through thousands of graphic documents detailing heinous acts committed against innocent children, I found myself struggling to sleep, having occasional nightmares as a result of what I was reading, hearing and feeling on an almost daily basis.

The same types of night terrors occurred after I left Buffalo, the devastation of victims’ families plus the awful livestream of Payton’s rampage – which he filmed through a camera-mounted helmet and streamed briefly to Twitch – playing in my mind.

This was compounded less than two weeks later when an even deadlier shooting took place in Texas, in which another 18-year-old gunman armed with an AR-15 rifle killed 19 students and two teachers at the Robb Elementary School in the small, Hispanic town of Uvalde.

The shocking attack was the worst in the state’s history, and I still often think about the parents who had to identify the bodies of their dead children, or survivors such as 11-year-old Miah Cerrillo, who covered herself with her dead friend’s blood and lay still to evade the shooter.

Three days after that shocking event, I found myself covering a National Rifle Association conference with Donald Trump as the guest speaker, in which the former president once again vowed to protect the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Dora Mendoza, grandmother of victim Amerie Jo Garza, wipes her tears at a memorial site for victims of the Robb Elementary School shooting at Uvalde, Texas.Credit: AP

But that’s the thing about mass shootings: they are a uniquely American problem, with a uniquely American lack of solutions. As an Australian living in such a gun-embracing country, this is something I will never understand.

Dozens of countries around the world have imposed gun restrictions to save lives, including ours, which initiated a gun buyback scheme after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre and now has a strict licensing and registration system to own a firearm.

The US, by comparison, is the only country where guns outnumber its citizens, with the latest figures suggesting there are 394 million firearms in America – about 120 guns per 100 people.

The NRA held its annual convention in Houston, Texas days after the Uvalde massacre.Credit: Bloomberg

Indeed, in 2024, there were 499 mass shootings – more than there are days in the year – according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines such incidents as four or more shot and/or killed in a single event (not including the shooter).

Throughout my term as US correspondent, I’ve covered my fair share, too: Buffalo and Uvalde; a gay nightclub shooting at Colorado Springs; a Fourth of July massacre in Chicago; a Lunar New Year festival mass shooting in Monterey Park, California; the Apalachee High School shooting in Georgia last year.

Crosses and rosaries hang in front of Robb Elementary in memorial to victims of the school shootings in Uvalde.Credit: AP

And every time, it’s a familiar cycle. Shock and outrage. Thoughts and prayers. Followed, inevitably, by a reluctance to ban assault weapons or impose other strict reforms to stop the carnage.

Standing in Buffalo that day, I had no answers to Cecilia’s question: “All this hate. For what?”

It was easier, at that moment, to just hold her hand as the tears flowed.

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