By Marc Jampole
Politicians, primarily Democrats, and cable news commentators
have tried to look beyond the individual pathology of Dylann Roof to explore
root social causes for his monstrous gunning down of nine African-Americans at
the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Some say a lack of gun
control laws is the culprit, others say racism, while still others assign equal
blame to both these American plagues.
Evidence is piling up that Roof is a virulent
racist. Friends said Roof would routinely spew racial invectives. He is
reported to have exclaimed that he killed the nine people at the Church solely
because they were black. There can be no doubt that his rabid racial anger found
encouragement in the distorted view of African-Americans visible in American
police dramas; the racial coding in the comments of Republican politicians; the
self-justifying aspects of our system of mass incarceration; the prevalence of
the Confederate flag and other symbols of slavery in his home state; and the several
white power and other hate groups in operation (although the police have yet to
find any connection between Roof and any of these groups).
There can be no doubt that Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel
AME confident that he was morally right in the actions he was about to take,
and that his moral fortitude fed not just on his own extreme racism, but also
on the acceptance and promotion of racism, both explicitly and implicitly, in
our society.
But let’s ask ourselves this question: Could he have faced
those nine people alone and killed them without a gun? Could he have killed
them if he weren’t a racist?
The answers, of course, are “no, he could not have done it alone
without a gun” and “yes, there are many reasons people kill.”
No matter how much we decry Dylann Roof’s disgusting beliefs
and no matter how much we do to eradicate racism in American society and
institutions, we will not reduce future mass murders and other gun killings
until we make it harder for people to obtain guns and carry them in public.
Look at Roof’s history, so similar in some ways to Adam
Lanza, Craig Hicks and other mass murderers: Roof is an anti-social loner who repeated 9th grade. He had previously been arrested for
trespassing and drug charges. His situation had deteriorated recently and he
was living out of his car at least on a part-time basis.
How did this
wacko get a gun?
Some newspapers
report his father gave him a .45-caliber gun for his 21st birthday, while
others are saying he bought one with the money his parents gave him for his
birthday. Either way, it’s a disturbing indictment of the ease at which people
can purchase weapons in most of the country.
The current line
from the gun lobby and their elected factotums is that when people carry guns,
they scare some criminals and can defend themselves from others. Their former glib
homily “When we outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns” has evolved into an
assertion that owning and carrying guns reduce crime.
The facts do not support this outrageous assertion. Not many studies are
done in the United States of the impact of guns because Congress passed a law
forbidding government support of such research. But the research that does
exist is clear: Increased gun ownership does not reduce crime. For example, the recent What Caused the
Crime Decline? by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School analyzes
the various factors that may have contributed to the decline in the crime rate
over the past 30 years and finds that the radical loosening of guns laws over
the same time frame has had zero impact on lowering crime rates. Other research tells us that throughout the world
and across the United States, the more guns are in private ownership in a
country or area, the higher the total rate of injuries and deaths from guns
will be.
During this period of public mourning for the slaughtered
innocents at Emanuel AME it is right and proper for all clear-thinking
Americans to contemplate the severe damage that racism has wrecked on
individuals, communities and the very fabric of American society. We should
rededicate ourselves to ending racism and that rededication should include specific
acts, such as working to end the system of mass incarceration, ending Draconian
voting laws meant to keep minorities from voting and the flying of the
Confederate in any public or government area. We should work to end racism
because it’s the moral and legal thing to do.
But we can’t forget that the primary—perhaps only--reason
that Dylann Roof killed nine people in a house of worship was not because he
hated African-Americans, but because he carried and used a gun. If we want to
end mass murders, we have to instill greater gun controls.
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