BREAKING: The shooter's been apprehended:
The suspect in Wednesday's deadly shooting at a South Carolina church has been apprehended in Shelby, North Carolina, according to local outlets WLTX and WSOC.The shooter, who was photographed by the church's security cameras, has not been identified. According to witnesses, he sat with the parishioners for an extended time before the shooting. He apparently released one church member so that she could tell everyone what happened. According to a cousin of the slain pastor who spoke to an eyewitness,
"...he had reloaded five different times and her son was trying to talk him out of doing that, killing people, and he just said, ‘I have to do it’ and he said, ‘You rape our women and you're taking over our country and you have to go.’” (emphasis added)It would be illuminating to understand what influences prompted the shooter to commit that act of racial hate. We hear definite echoes of those thoughts from the far-right when it comes to immigration and racial bias (Trump's discourse Tuesday on Mexicans, for example). The "take our country back" rhetoric of the Tea Party conjures up the same paranoia that hostile racial/ethnic forces have taken over the country. It would be a mockery of the dead to simply dismiss this as an isolated case of a deranged killer (or in Rudy 9-11's diversionary description, "just evil"), and not to explore the environment in which he developed his deranged thinking.
UPDATE I: The killer has just been identified as Dylann Storm Roof. Here's his photo:
Suspect in #Charleston shooting identified as 21 yr old Dylann Roof. If you know his whereabouts, call 1-800-CALL-FBI pic.twitter.com/EmFL5gLMCL
— Berkeley County SC (@BerkeleySCGov) June 18, 2015
UPDATE II: The execrable Fux and Friends' Steve "Douchey" Doocy wants to make this look like an attack on Christians, despite the shooter's own words. They have no shame whatsoever.
