Gore Vidal once said that it was mighty convenient John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King had all been killed by loners, by curiously isolated killers, who just happened to not be part of a broader conspiracy.
Same as it ever was.
A lone gunman shot nine people in Charleston, South Carolina last night. The victims were black; the gunman white. The predictable, boring, American conversation about gun control will now take place and fizzle out; calls to have a ‘conversation about race’ will be made; many folks will point out the double standards employed by the media when reporting on attacks by Muslims and African-Americans (or any other threatening minority). This is all depressingly familiar. So desperate has the business of gun control become that I suspect some folks might actually wish for a mass shooting to be conducted by a Muslim or African-American person just so that the NRA and its right-wing allies could be galvanized into accepting some form of firearm regulation.
How could this come to be? What could possibly have motivated the gunman? South Carolina’s governor, Nikki Haley, who as Chase Madar pointed out, likes to fly the Confederate flag in the state capital, claims that “‘we’ll never understand what motivates’ the massacre in Charleston.” Au contraire. We know or can surmise with reasonable certainty the following about this latest installment in America’s long, dark, double-barreled, automatic loading nightmare: The gunman was a racist, one infected by paranoia and prejudice, who had easy access to guns. He was possessed by rage, he had the means with which to give expression to the rage.
There is, of course, another dimension to the white rage on display. Over the past year or so, white ragers could not have failed to notice that black folks have gotten awfully uppity. They relentlessly document police shootings and make those videos go viral; they march and protest; they block traffic; they lie down on the street and play dead, all the while chanting stuff like “I can’t breathe“; they level one damning accusation after another of systemic racism at this country’s political, economic and social institutions; heck, they’ve even come up with a hashtag about how their ‘lives matter.’ This constant blaming, this futile dredging through past ills like slavery and the denial of the vote and lynching and red-lining is deeply counterproductive; it prevents us from moving onwards to a consideration of which bankers’ pet will be on television most for the next sixteen months, all the while filling our airwaves with vapid promises and extravagant claims to keep this country safe from overseas threats.
The man who stepped into the church yesterday and let fly might have had enough; perhaps the anger on display in the marches and protests was unsettling; perhaps the constant calls to police the police, those folks who guard him against the advancing forces of blackness, had made him fearful.
He wasn’t alone in his feelings, and he won’t be the last one to act out his fear by exercising his Second Amendment rights.
Samir Chopra 