Horrible, horrible story.
IME, black churches around here don’t have white congregants, ever. It’s not that they aren’t welcome, of course, just that white people apparently have no interest in attending. So I find it a little odd that nobody thought it was strange that this guy was at a weekday service.
Assuming this Roof guy is the actual shooter, there doesn’t seem to be much doubt that he was a white supremacist.
I imagine they did think it was strange, but what were they going to do? They weren’t going to kick him out if he was just sitting there, and they weren’t going to call the police on a guy doing nothing – I’m sure all they could do, reasonably, is act welcoming and friendly to a potential new congregant.
So freaking what? They came here to kill. They learned their doctrine of hatred from Russian Taliban members. They were despicable human beings, and I do not consider them Americans.
Sadly, the main suspect in these shootings is a home grown white supremacist.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a United States citizen. He was naturalized on Sept 11. 2012.
Tamerlan was a permanent resident and his application for citizenship was pending review.
Dzokhar Tzarnaev came here when he was eight years old. I’m reasonably certain he wasn’t planning to kill anyone, but maybe he was just one of those precocious supervillains.
After the shock and the grief many of us will want to look at ways to prevent this kind of terrible event from happening in the future. That is not perverse. This is our country, these are our people. Such is a decent human motivation and in no way “morally questionable.”
Yeah, I don’t agree with the whole “don’t politicize this tragedy until next week” idea. Events and reactions are political. We don’t make them political by talking about their political implications. It would be insensitive to do so to the victims themselves in the immediate aftermath, but on a public message board? Nah.
More than that, the “don’t politicize” is sometimes used because of disagreement on the political substance. Few who agree with that idea were castigating George Bush for going on the air on 9/11 and talking about how they hate us for our freedom and we should fight back with military force.
“Don’t politicize it” means “because I know my side is in the wrong but I refuse to face it and act accordingly”.
Pretending each of these incidents is isolated is a way to avoid addressing their frequency, and therefore their causes.
CNN is reporting the suspect has been taken in to custody. He was arrested in Shelby, NC. Charleston police will be having a press conference shortly.
Hallelujah. Hope they have the right guy.
Apparently the suspect’s father had given him a .45-caliber handgun for his birthday in April.
Happy Birthday, son.
It’s hard to predict what an early 20s kid will do and you may be right. An uncle is reported to have said he was given a 45 automatic (yeah, we know it’s a semi. Save your thumbs.) for his birthday. CNN reports he reloaded 5 times, so 5 extra clips. If it’s a 1911 style, which seems the classic, they are 7+1 standard, but some aftermarket clips are 8+1.
Doing the horrible math in a worst case scenario, we have 9+8+8+8+8+8= 49 bullets expended. One box holds 50, so he probably bought 2 at least. If he gathered up his empty clips, it means he has a full box of bullets in clips at his disposal in any fire fight with a weapon that can easily kill or cripple with just one shot.
His whereabouts are unknown and he could be anywhere from Miami to Baltimore by now with no reason to give himself up.
Dibbs, that’s the only reason I’m hoping you’re right. I’m not wishing death on Anybody… I’m just saying that if death has to come to either innocent victims / cops or a mass murderer… that the latter is the lesser of two evils.
I predict with 99% certainty that somebody will be talking today about how this tragedy could have been prevented if we required all pastors to carry handguns.
…and now he’s been caught.
Nm.
Glad to hear this.
Of course. And others will talk about how gun control could have prevented this. And others will talk about how white supremacy is still real. And others will talk about how we would be reacting if this guy had been an Islamic extremist instead of a white supremacist. And others will be talking about how the media circus makes things worse.
I don’t see why waiting a week to have those conversations does anyone any good, except as a matter of in-person courtesy to the victims and their families.
Candidate Bush had canceled his trip to Charleston. Just announced on HLN.
Different Bush, same “hide in a hole” gutless mentality.
“Will this hurt us…?”
“Well, you just lost your bravery bonus.”
“Dang.”
What side are you talking about? No one in here is even advocating for gun rights. The first I’m touching on them is now.
But even if so, if your goal is to prevent gun deaths, spree shootings are a pretty insignificant blip. Somewhere like an average of 25 gun homicides happen every day in the US. The 8 or 9 we see here isn’t even a full day’s worth. It’s entirely possible that yesterday was a below-average day for gun deaths. The number of spree shooting deaths a year is between a dozen and two dozen. We have less spree shooting deaths in a year than we have gun homicides every day. Focusing on spree shootings as some sort of epidemic that needs a widespread, extreme solution is ridiculous. They account for roughly 1 percent of 1 percent of gun homicides.
So, then, to think that spree shootings are this massive out of control problem is severely illogical. To me, given how much infamy and attention anyone can have by doing it, and the pervasive amount of guns, I think the number of spree shootings is almost unbelievably low. If you had asked me to guess in the hypothetical how many rampage killings happen in a country of 320 million people where ending your life in that way guarantees you all the attention and infamy you could want, I would guess that the number of incidents would be orders of magnitude higher than what we actually see.
So, then, why do these incidents always come with new pushes for gun control? Exactly because it has a disproportionate emotional reaction with the public. On the grand scheme of things, 9/11 was not a big deal, it was no existential threat to our country, it doesn’t even amount to the threat of a fleabite compared to the actual existential threat we faced for the latter half of the 20th century, and yet the public’s reaction was far disproportional to any actual damage or danger.
And politicians struck while the iron was hot there. We had those in power who were waiting for the day that something tragic and something that captured the public’s emotional reaction would allow them to use the hysteria to push agendas they knew wouldn’t fly during calmer, more rational times. That’s how we ended up with the Patriot act, expanded police powers, expanded domestic spying, and countless other real negative shit-on-the-myth-of-America things that we’ll never get rid of.
If you care about gun deaths, spree shootings are amongst the rarest sort, probably right up there with “a kangaroo somehow got my hunting rifle and shot me with it”, an almost complete non-issue. If you actually want to solve the issue of rampage killings (and it turns to bombs or other weapons when guns aren’t available), then you should stop giving those who perpetrate them the reward they crave.