If it were 1953, he’d merely be a Klansman.
This is actually a key point- Roof has said he took his murderous action on his own precisely because there really ISN’T a Klan or any other organized racial hate group out there any more!
He was hoping to find one, but was disgusted to learn that there are really just a handful of racist cranks posting little-read diatribes on the Internet, and none of them seemed to want to DO anything!
Not surprisingly, Roof’s crimes have led many people to cry, “Crack down on hate groups!” But as Roof would tell you, there just AREN’T any serious hate groups to crack down on any more!
There aren’t any big open hate groups that openly advocate white supremacy any more, but I think there are a number of groups that do it in a more subtle fashion. Publications like Taki’s, VDARE, and American Renaissance advocate for the biological inferiority of various groups (black people and Latin American immigrants, chiefly), for example.
Sorry, but nobody is going to read Taki’s site and come away inspired to shoot people.
Yes and no… The KKK is active in Orange County, California. They’re openly recruiting, and distributing flyers advocating hatred of blacks, Jews, Latinos, and others.
They do exist… But they’re almost entirely marginalized. Their effectiveness is reduced to spray-paint vandalism, the occasional lone assault (scary enough, of course, and wholly intolerable,) and other acts that are, by and large, more symbolic than instrumental.
They’re also dumb as dirt. Their flyers are barely literate.
I am not aware of any laws that would have prevented Dylann Roof from buying a gun. The NY Times article is not citing any such law. Roof’s pending drug charge was not a felony charge. It was a misdemeanor charge. South Carolina laws (I looked it up) classify his offense as a misdemeanor, not a felony. So - what is FBI talking about?
Interesting. The SPLC doesn’t even list an active Klan group in California at all. I’d guess lone wolf if I were a betting man.
But even apart from their marginalization, it’s important to remember that there are fewer than 10,000 active Klan members in the country. That’s lost in the statistical noise in a country of 300 million.
Stormfront and Reddit’s r/coontown have plenty of people advocating white supremacy openly. Though the individual people are closer to anonymous than known, they’re still essentially hate groups.