Is there anything so shocking as random, summary executions?
It has happened again, this time in Charleston, South Carolina, at a historically black church.
A white man walked into a historic African-American church in Charleston and opened fire during a Bible study class, killing nine people Wednesday evening.
The gunman was still at large early Thursday. And the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest AME church in the South, is being investigated as a hate crime.
It is much too soon to speculate about the cause; the kid could have been spurned by a girl and snapped, he could have lost his job and his car and snapped, he could have been beat-up by a gang of black kids a few hours earlier and snapped. Who knows?
But speculation is rampant, and not without reason, that this is yet another instance of the south’s (and spreading) sick fusion of fundamentalist religion, tribal racism, and extreme right-wing ideology. Recall the perverse imagery used by Promise Keepers to promote its conference:
Those armed and camoed guys advancing through a dystopian bleakscape are the good guys, according to Promise Keepers. As I said then:
That text, in combination with that imagery, is frightening stuff; these people are out of their minds, and it is only a matter of time before some ignorant yahoo, stoked on malice for a world he no longer understands, decides God wants him to go shoot-up a gay bar or who-knows-what.
The recklessness is downright breathtaking.
For the sake of all of us, I hope we learn that the killer is some mentally ill screw-up, like James Holmes, the Aurora theater shooter.