I'll buy it....not because he would have walked in shooting and the whole alto section of the choir would have returned fire. The common denominator in mass shootings is that they occur in places where the shooter knows he will have an unarmed, target-rich environment, emphasis on unarmed. Not saying he would have been completely deterred; he might have shot up a school in a black neighborhood instead. But he wasn't going anywhere that he knew he had a chance to get shot himself. As Red said in the OP, he's at heart a coward.
I seldom side with MSNBC on a story angle but I think they are spot on in this case. I have a hard time blaming mental illness in this case unless pure hatred is a mental illness. He was a fully functioning adult. He was a loser with a loser mentality.
And so the assault on guns begins again. If guns were illegal Roof would still likely have gotten a gun. If he couldn't get one he would have made a bomb. I'm beggining to wonder. Since most of the mass shootings the perps are white youths from teens to early 20's and probably easily brainwashed is it the antigun lobby doing the brainwashing to draw sympathy to their cause or is the the gun manufacturers because every time something like this happens the sales of guns go through the roof (no pun intended)
Obviously mental illness can lead to delusions, including the notion that he must start a race war. I think the chances that he is mentally ill are 90%. We will see.
I disagree for the very reason I gave in my post. There are plenty of people who are very racist, who are leaders in hate groups, who talk hatred all day long but never get a weapon and start killing folks. Blaming things on "pure hatred" is equal to blaming such crimes on the devil imo and dismisses the fact that the onset of serious mental illness is between the ages of 19-23, the age group of each of the young men who've committed these atrocities.
no one is assaulting guns around here, at least that I can tell. that gun is harmless unless a human with mental illness and enough delusion is holding it.
Wake up and smell the coffee. Any guns in the hands of any lunatic is everybody's problem. Measures to deal with this problem must be considered. We The People are sick of school shootings, theater shootings, Gabby Giffords-type shootings, church shootings and any shooting conducted by mentally unstable people. Anybody that thinks efforts to keep guns out of lunatics hands constitute an "Assault on guns" is an friggin' idiot.
Do you know how Roof got his gun? HIS DAD BOUGHT IT FOR HIM! It's likely he didn't talk crazy around his family but his roommate said he talked about killing blacks all the time.
Do we know that his family didn't know he hated blacks? In my experience (which is by no means conclusive), I find that people tend to be either racist or NOT based on the teachings/beliefs within their families. In many cases, each generation is becoming less and less racist, which is wonderful. However, the biggest place to become a racist is within someone's family. I'm betting his family knows how he feels about blacks because it's likely they do, too. That is merely my opinion, but it's probably a good bet. About the purchase of the gun, the Sandy Hook shooter's mother bought him guns, too (and was reportedly scared of her own evil, freakish son--but not enough to not buy that maniac weapons...wtf?). That idiot paid with her own life first. I wish Adam Lanza had just stopped there with his mother and himself.
there is more to this story and I assume we'll get more of it in the days ahead. I agree with @StaceyO that racism is a learned behavior.
