It appears there has been a shooting at the historic Emmanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston during services tonight. The NYTimes and CNN are reporting multiple fatalities. Both news accounts mentioned this is one of the oldest black churches in the country.
The suspect has been described as a clean shaven white male in his early 20’s who is still at large.
Well, shit. Here we go again.
Sympathy to the victims and families involved.
The Mayor of Charleston is holding a press conference at the moment. Suspect is approx. 21 year old white male with sandy blond hair and still on the loose.
So far 9 fatalities reported.
Dammit.
One of the victims, the pastor of the church, was also apparently a state senator, not saying that was the motive, just surprised me.
Super duper more important than the thousands of other people murdered today. Let’s talk about nothing but this for 2 weeks.
Uh… Okay.
If it makes you feel any better, it could be considered quite important in the context of racial tensions roused by recent cases of police brutality.
And yes, thousands of other people were murdered today. Are you saying that NONE are significant?
The racial tensions have nothing to do with it. Any sort of spree shooter is going to have wall to wall news coverage for weeks, giving the shooter the big blaze of glory and infamy he so desires.
So many inconceivably awful things happen around the world on a daily basis that you have to be numb to them individually or you’d go insane. Do you know how many prepubescent girls were raped to death yesterday? It’s almost certainly a many-per-day occurrence. How many people in barbaric countries were beaten to death in a horrific way by crowds for minor infractions? How many people drowned little babies in a tub yesterday? If you actually gave equal care to every horrific event out there, you’d go insane. It’s too much to process.
So we pick and choose what tragic events we decide to care about. Mass shootings are apparently very satisfying things for people to make a big show out of showing sympathy over. They come with a perk - you get to chastise all of those evil stupid gun owners for enabling this tragedy to happen. Why does this tragedy trump a thousand other tragedies that happened today? Because you don’t get to say “I told you so” at the end of those.
And I will go further than that. I’ve never hurt anyone with a gun nor is it likely that I would ever do so unless justifiably compelled to, and as such, I have almost nothing to do with this tragedy. However, spree shooters want infamy. They fantasize about the big blaze of glory they get. They fantasize about being noticed, remembered, reviled. They love the fame. They love your obsession with their crime. It’s why they do it.
Our pervasive culture of giving spree shooters the exact notoriety that they’re looking for is far more responsible for incentivizing those sorts of incidents than mere gun ownership is. The news stations are going to have “experts” speculating baselessly on the psychology of the perpetrator, interviewing people he knew, showing old high school photos, figuring out what music he listened to, what movies he watched, or what video games he played so they can do even more chastisement - and that’s the action that spurs these people on.
We choose where we put our focus. We decide that 99.9% of the tragedies and suffering and horrible shit in the world aren’t worthy of our attention. But we perversely choose to focus on these sorts of incidents as being worthy of our attention. We choose to spend our attention on one of the very few crimes that’s done specifically because they seek our attention.
That’s why the obsession with spree shootings is sick and perverted. On some level, you feel superior for being able to shake your finger at others, and that recreational concern over these incidents is what actually fuels them. Real people die because we obsess about these things. Real people would be saved if we didn’t give the killers exactly what they wanted.
SenorBeef, do you have some evidence that shows that mass killers are mostly motivated by the attention we will give to the killer? This seems like a rather simplistic explanation to me.
I mean, how would you quantify such a thing? It seems obvious that a common motivation for spree killers is to go out with a big bang, to show the world who ignored or mistreated them that they’re a force to be reckoned with. Yes, there are incidents where the shooter wrote some sort of note or manifesto in which they clearly sought the infamy they’re going to receive, but I don’t have time to go seeking it now, and I generally dislike demonstrating the obvious. But this is a good start.
To turn this around, imagine this. Imagine spree shootings weren’t given such sensational coverage - let’s say they were a small note on national broadcasts, perhaps a short story on local news - and there was no big infamy to be gained. Do you think that none of the spree shooters we’ve seen would be disincentivized to do what they did? If they grew up in a culture that didn’t allow instant fame and infamy and a sense of importance to someone who committed those crimes, would not a single one have been prevented?
If you can admit that even in one case the sensationalist obsession with spree shooters provided the motivation to get someone to carry one out, then people died to pay for your choice to obsess over these things.
Remember when that guy shot up the Canadian parliament not too long ago? Do you know what his name was? What his manifesto was? What violent video games made him do it? No, because the Canadian media didn’t sensationalize the story, it didn’t give the killer the spotlight he so craved. They are morally superior to us on this issue, and as a result of creating that sort of culture, they probably have saved lives.
There is evidence of such motivation in previous mass killings. Whether or not it is the prime motivation(and I believe it possibly is) is debateable. That it is a motivation in a number of these incidents is known. Even if we did not have the killers own words on the matter common sense tells you the media attention surely plays a part. When you have spree killers allowing a victim to live to tell the tale, and other killers posting videos of themselves on youtube then I think we can we can to an extent label these killers as wannabe media whores.
Of course the Canadian shooter fortunately only killed one person. This is hardly comparable to a mass shooting.
We can probably all agree the 24/7 coverage of horrible mass crimes is often a grotesque kind of voyeurism. But being numb to such violence without trying to make sense of the senseless isn’t the answer whether we are talking about shootings or the rapes of prepubescent girls. And “a short story on the local news” is not a desirable way to handle a tragic shooting that directly touches many local lives.
Gosh, let’s hope nobody tries to politicize this tragic event…oh, I see someone already started. Well done, SenorBeef…so forward-thinking of you to get in before the no doubt scores of SD gun control advocates descended on the thread.
I really hate that this is already being labeled a “hate crime.” Perhaps there is a racial motivation, but there’s no need to toss gasoline onto the racial tension fire less than 24 hours after the incident. It might turn out that the shooter was looking for the AMC theatre rather than the AME church.
Isn’t one of the victims a state senator? Which forms a question in my mind: if John Hinckley had succeeded in killing Reagan, should the media have ignored it? I mean, he did it to get attention, and it’s just one guy. What should the media and public do if someone shoots up an elementary school or blows up the Super Bowl for attention? “Oh, well, it sucks that people died, but we should ignore it”?
You know, if someone shot up, say, a synagogue or a mosque, no-one here would be doubting that it was a racially or religiously motivated attack.
The individual being sought by police is white and it is likely most, if not all, of those killed and injured are black so it isn’t unreasonable to expect racial bias was a motivation for the perpetrators actions. The fact he has made an effort to avoid capture could indicate he isn’t interested in fame or notoriety as much as creating fear among a segment of the public or making a statement of some type.
Or he could just be a nut. At this point though the fact he made the effort to escape and has so far been successful makes me think probably not.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to return to the ongoing 20-page analysis of who died in Game of Thrones.”
I hope they have enough to go on to catch this guy. The description seems generic enough as to be nearly useless and the vehicle is described simply as a black sedan. The police have their work cut out for them here. It’s quite likely a hate crime but perhaps one of the victims was a primary personal target and the rest were collateral damage. It seems to me that if the guy wanted to go out in a blaze of glory he would have stuck around for a shootout. I don’t believe infamy was his motivation.
It’s unfortunate that the gun lovers have to immediately jump in with their standard comments. OH MY GOD! ARE MY GUNS GOING TO BE OK? WHO CARES ABOUT THESE PEOPLE WHEN OTHERS DIE EVERY DAY? NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO TALK ABOUT GUNS! OH YEAH, WELL HE COULD HAVE TAKEN THE VICTIMS ONE BY ONE TO A SWIMMING POOL AND DROWNED THEM- WHAT ABOUT THAT, HUH? The truth is that incidents like this are a consequence of the availability of guns. Mass shootings make the news in the same way that airplane crashes make news while car crashes don’t- numbers matter.
Images of the perpetrator taken from surveillance footage have been released. The authorities are saying they have images of the car used to get away and that the car had unique vanity plates. I imagine this will help identify him and make getting him in custody easier. Hopefully he won’t be able to harm anyone else before that happens.
That’s awesome! Now I’m more optimistic that they will have enough to go on. One would think that car experts could identify the year and model of the car, cross match that with vanity plates issued in SC, and have a manageable list to go on.