One of Roof’s high school classmates said in an interview that he didn’t think Roof was a racist. ["The former classmate told The Daily Beast that he didn’t think Roof was a racist so much as a conservative with a lot of “Southern Pride.”
That’s the undertext of “Don’t politicize this” and “This isn’t the time”. So yes, they are.
That is not a very good pro-gun-rights argument, as you may realize.
Yes, but doesn’t that mean we finally need to quit pretending there’s no problem?
Why do you seem to imply that there is some base level of gun homicides, of any type, we should consider normal and acceptable?
Good thing nobody’s making that claim, then.
Yes, because the shock value has some hope of getting through the denialist mindset, while a steady drip-drip of murders has not.
Your claim means that’s the reason they do it, and that they’d be dissuaded if it wasn’t there. But they’re not reasoning or reasonable people at all, are they? Preventing them from killing requires more direct, more realistic measures, doesn’t it?
And a sentiment that sadly isn’t limited to the South, regardless of what many think. The racial element of this is what I find deeply disturbing. All the yammering about gun rights and gun control in this thread and in the media misses the larger problem of how deeply ingrained racist attitudes are in this country. The motive is more disturbing to me than the method.
Yep. This is a guy whose classmates (some of them, at least) didn’t think was racist despite openly admitting that he made frequent racist jokes.
I think there’s this idea that the only sort of racism that is “real” racism is “I hate all black people and they should be exterminated”, and anything that falls short of that is something other than racism.
