I’m sure you have seen the news. On June 17th, 2015, Dylann Roof went into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina (one of the oldest black churches in the state, and a site long known for its community organization around civil rights). Roof spent an hour with the church group before pulling out a gun, and killing 9 of them.
It seams like an open and shut case. Some dumb, angry white racist who can’t take responsibility for how shitty his life is, instead blames black people and decides to gun a bunch of them down. We’ve seen it before. Hell, maybe we know someone like him (without the violent streak). And after all, this did take place in the “heart of Dixie” Could there be any other explanation other then dumb racism turned violent?
It doesn’t seem so. Before opening fire on the church congregation, Roof is reported to have said: ‘You rape our women and you’re taking over our country.’ There is even a website, registered to Roof (and created earlier this year), that has a racist manifesto. The writer of this manifesto complains about the Trayvon Martin case, and seems upset about “white flight”. He also shows no sense of personal responsibility for the situation he is in, and instead tries to blame it on another race. “Integration has done nothing but bring Whites down to level of brute animals.” He claims. Just before committing an act more heinous then that of a “brute animal”. (can we add hypocrite to his charges?… no wait, that isn’t illegal). All while spewing the ignorant racist rhetoric you would expect to find in the writings of someone who targeted a black church with historic ties to civil rights.
After being arrested, Roof claimed he committed this heinous crime to start a race war. This is where the narrative started to bother me. I’ve heard the term “race war” recently, but it wasn’t coming from white supremacists. It was coming from the other side of the spectrum. Roof supposedly created a Facebook page earlier this year (which has been taken down at the time of this writing). The NY Times reports that Roof had 88 friends. 88 is a number used by white supremacists to symbolize heil Hitler (H is the 8th letter in the alphabet). What the NY times doesn’t report, but The Guardian does, is that a number of those 88 friends are black (I can’t confirm this because when I tried to check the facebook page, it was suspended).
The Associated press is running an interview with one of Roofs drinking buddies. The friend, Christon Scriven (who is black), claims that Roof had told him that he planned to shoot up The College of Charleston, but Scriven didn’t believe him. “I don’t think the church was his primary target because he told us he was going for the school,” Scriven said Friday. “But I think he couldn’t get into the school because of the security … so I think he just settled for the church.”
The AP account claims that Roof used birthday money from his parents to buy a .45-caliber Glock semi-automatic handgun that was supposedly used in the shooting. This goes against the official narrative that Roof got the gun as a birthday gift. (Of course passing a background check and buying the gun goes against our presidents stance that a background check could have stopped him).
I’m not going to go as far as some, and claim that the Charleston church shooting is a “false flag” attack, or was somehow faked, but I do think that the mainstream media is manipulating this story to push an agenda. And I don’t particularly like it when someone shamelessly manipulates a horrific tragedy to push an agenda.
A Couple Ironies
I find it odd that in the manifesto attributed to Roof , he says “N*** are stupid and violent.”, Yet his actions clearly show that the same can be said of white people.
I also find it odd that this is the biggest story in the news, yet we hear little about the 9 black people shot at a block party in Detroit, or the 10 black people shot at a block party in Philadelphia over the weekend. Of course there were only 3 black people killed in those two incidents, so I guess that makes them less newsworthy. Although, I would wager all 3 shooters where trying to kill the people they were shooting at.
Also, If we are looking to outlaw things to save lives, has anyone looked into banning block parties?
Update:
Many people have used this event to shamelessly push political agendas. In recent weeks we have seen the simpleminded attack southern symbolism. TV stations have taken Dukes of Hazard episodes off the air because the car has a rebel (confederate) flag on it, Apple has removed civil war games from it’s app store because they show the rebel flag, and South Carolina has removed the rebel flag from a confederate soldiers memorial…
Many people have also tried to bring the gun debate into this situation. Recently, the FBI has said that Dylann Roof should not have passed the background check to be able to purchase the weapon because of a previous arrest. He wasn’t flagged, however, because of a paperwork error. Proof again, that gun control would not have stopped this.
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