Seven observations on the Charleston church shooting
On the evening of June 17, a mass shooting occurred at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. The gunman killed nine people and wounded one, with senior pastor and state senator Clementa Pinckney among the dead. All were African Americans. The next morning, police arrested 21-year-old Dylann Roof, a white man, who had fled to Shelby, N.C. He now faces nine murder charges and one charge of using a deadly weapon in a violent crime in South Carolina, and may also face hate crime and/or terrorism charges at the federal level. Seven observations on the events follow.
1. Madmen like Dylann Roof are made, not born. A mass murderer never truly acts alone. Roof is known to have had an unstable family environment with an abusive father, a mother who had affairs, and divorce. He attended six different schools between fourth and ninth grade, eventually dropping out of high school. Without an education, employment, or parental guidance, he turned to drugs and violent racist teachings on the internet. Had he had a stable family environment and sound parental guidance, this chain of events could have been avoided.
2. The statist left will not let a crisis go to waste. Within hours of the shooting, President Obama used the shooting to call for new gun control measures. Hillary Clinton followed suit shortly thereafter. To politicize a tragedy and use it to put emotion above reason and evidence is par from the course for those who seek to expand the power of the state and curtail individual rights.
3. No proposed gun control measure would have stopped Roof. As is usual as of late, gun grabbers have focused on universal background checks, assault weapon bans, high-capacity magazine bans, and denial of firearm access to the mentally ill. We know that a background check would not have stopped Roof because it did not; he passed a background check before purchasing a .45 caliber Glock 41 pistol. We know that an assault weapon ban would not have stopped Roof because he used a handgun, which is not considered an assault weapon. We know that a ban on high-capacity magazines would not have stopped Roof because he reloaded five times with standard-capacity magazines, according to an eyewitness. Laws meant to keep guns out of the hands of mentally ill people would not have stopped Roof because he had not been diagnosed with a mental illness.
4. Stopping criminals is not the true purpose of gun control. The true purpose of gun control is not to control guns, but to control people. The rational self-interest of those who wield state power is to expand that power and protect their grasp on it. Disarming the subjects of the state leaves them dependent on government for defense against common criminals and helpless to defend themselves against agents of the government. The endgame is to allow government agents to commit crimes under color of law that they would not be able to get away with if the people were armed. This strategy has a long history; for example, Toyotomi Hideyoshi decreed in August 1588 that “[t]he people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, short swords, bows, spears, firearms, or other types of arms. The possession of unnecessary implements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues and tends to foment uprisings.”
5. Evil people with guns are best stopped by good people with guns. More people need to be armed so that thugs like Roof can be exterminated on contact before they cause so much damage. Although this mass shooting ended because Roof could not find anyone else alive whom he wanted to kill, most mass shootings end when armed people close in on and confront the shooter. It would have been easy for an armed churchgoer or security guard to kill Roof during any of the five times that he had to reload his handgun. Unfortunately, South Carolina’s carry laws ban the carrying of arms in churches unless express permission is given by the church officials or governing body of the church, rendering most churches into victim disarmament zones.
6. The path to the above solution is anti-political. It is against the rational self-interest of those who wield state power for the citizenry to be well-armed. Most Republican politicians have some aversion to putting more guns into the hands of poor people and African Americans, and most Democratic politicians would prefer not to put more guns into the hands of anyone who is not a government agent. The political system is rigged against independent and third party candidates, so while some of them would support this agenda, their efforts will be all but meaningless. The goal of arming more citizens so that they can protect themselves must therefore be accomplished by anti-political means, such as 3-D printing of firearms, neighborhood watch programs, and militia organizing efforts.
7. The Confederate flag debacle is a sideshow, but a predictable one. The leftists know that they cannot win on gun control and want to feel like they can do something, even if it would have absolutely no effect against mass murderers, so they are going after an issue where they can win: outrage over the Confederate flag and an initiative to remove it from display on government property, such as the South Carolina State House. Of course this has gone too far, such that classic films are no longer being showed, strategy games set in the Civil War period are being removed from stores, and tearing down Confederate memorials is being considered, but when has the idea of going too far ever mattered to leftists? The reality is that there are far bigger fish to fry. We should be more concerned about the approximately 200 nation states which are still operating and engaging in murder, slavery, kidnapping, robbery, and other violent crimes on a massive scale than about the flag of a nation state which has been defunct for 150 years.
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