WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a Second
Amendment challenge to a Chicago suburb’s ordinance that banned semiautomatic
assault weapons and large-capacity magazines.
The decision not to hear the case has no precedential force, but was nonetheless
part of a series of signals from the Supreme Court giving at least tacit
approval to even quite strict gun control laws in states and localities that
choose to enact them.
“The justices don’t reveal their reasons for denying review, but one thing is
clear,” said Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los
Angeles. “The justices certainly aren’t eager to take up a Second Amendment case
these days.”
“One has to wonder,” he said, “if the Supreme Court is having second thoughts
about the Second Amendment.”
The court will sooner or later return to the subject of the scope of the Second
Amendment right first recognized in 2008 in District of Columbia v. Heller,
which struck down parts of an exceptionally strict local law that barred keeping
guns in the home for self-defense. But the justices do not seem eager to do so
even as the nation is in the midst of a sharp debate over gun control in the
wake of shooting rampages in San Bernardino, Calif., and across the nation.
In dissent on Monday, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Antonin Scalia,
accused the court of abdicating its responsibility to enforce the constitutional
right to keep and bear arms. (Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion in the
Heller case, which was decided by a 5 to 4 vote.)
“Roughly five million Americans own AR-style semiautomatic rifles,” Justice
Thomas wrote, referring, he said, to “modern sporting rifles.”
“The overwhelming majority of citizens who own and use such rifles do so for
lawful purposes, including self-defense and target shooting,” Justice Thomas
wrote. “Under our precedents, that is all that is needed for citizens to have a
right under the Second Amendment to keep such weapons.”
Chuck Michel, president of the California Rifle and Pistol Association, said the
dissent made powerful points. “It is only a matter of time,” he said, “before
the Supreme Court takes a case, sets things straight, and properly subjects this
and similar unconstitutional laws to renewed challenge.”
Gun control advocates heard a different message. “The American people have had
enough of gun violence and, with the exception of Justices Thomas and Scalia, in
this case, the Supreme Court sided with them,” said Dan Gross, president of the
Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
Monday’s case, Friedman v. City of Highland Park, No. 15-133, concerned an
ordinance in Highland Park, Ill. It was, enacted in 2013.
“Sandy Hook had just happened,” Nancy R. Rotering, the city’s mayor, recalled on
Monday, referring to the mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school.
“It was a common-sense step to reduce gun violence and to protect our children
and our community.”
The ordinance banned some weapons by name, including AR-15s and AK-47s. More
generally, it prohibited possession of what it called assault weapons, defining
them as semiautomatic guns that can accept large-capacity magazines and have
features like a grip for the nontrigger hand. Large-capacity magazines, the
ordinance said, are those that can accept more than 10 rounds. A federal assault
weapons ban, including a prohibition on high-capacity magazines, expired in
2004.
In the Heller case in 2008, the Supreme Court found for the first time that the
Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms. In 2010, the court
extended the principle to state and local governments.
The Highland Park ordinance was drafted with those cases in mind, said Steven M.
Elrod, a lawyer for the city and the author of the law. “The rights secured by
the Second Amendment are not unlimited,” he said.
Since 2010, the Supreme Court has turned away appeals in any number of Second
Amendment challenges to gun control laws. Monday’s move was telling, Professor
Winkler said.
“The court’s action will encourage gun control advocates to push for bans on
assault weapons,” he said. “This is one of the items at the top of the gun
control agenda. Now advocates have less to fear from the courts on this issue.”
The ordinance was challenged by the Illinois State Rifle Association and Dr.
Arie S. Friedman, who at his home had kept guns and magazines for self-defense
that were banned by the ordinance. The term “assault weapons,” they told the
justices, “is an imaginary and pejorative category.”
The Illinois rifle group and Dr. Friedman urged the Supreme Court to address
what they called “the lower courts’ massive resistance to Heller and their
refusal to treat Second Amendment rights as deserving respect equal to other
constitutional rights.”
A supporting brief filed by 24 states said the ordinance “bans many commonly
used firearms and the standard capacity magazines for many popular firearms.”
In April, a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for
the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, upheld the Highland Park ordinance.
On the one hand, Judge Frank H. Easterbrook wrote for the majority, “assault
weapons can be beneficial for self-defense because they are lighter than many
rifles and less dangerous per shot than large-caliber pistols or revolvers.”
He added that “householders too frightened or infirm to aim carefully may be
able to wield them more effectively than the pistols James Bond preferred.”
“But assault weapons with large-capacity magazines can fire more shots, faster,
and thus can be more dangerous in aggregate,” he continued. “Why else are they
the weapons of choice in mass shootings?”
Justice Thomas rejected that reasoning. In general, he said, the courts have
been treating the Second Amendment as a second-class citizen notwithstanding the
pathbreaking decisions in 2008 and 2010.
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A version of this article appears in print on December 8, 2015, on page A19 of
the New York edition with the headline: Sign of Tacit Approval as Justices Turn
Away Challenge to a Local Effort to Regulate Guns.
It is a moral outrage and national disgrace
that civilians can legally purchase
weapons
designed to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency.
DEC. 4, 2015
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
All decent people feel sorrow and righteous fury about the latest
slaughter of innocents, in California. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies
are searching for motivations, including the vital question of how the murderers
might have been connected to international terrorism. That is right and proper.
But motives do not matter to the dead in California, nor did they in Colorado,
Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut and far too many other places. The
attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders
whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and
political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread
of ever more powerful firearms.
It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally
purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and
efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed
as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders
offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of
consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing, as
they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about the word terrorism.
Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of
terrorism.
Opponents of gun control are saying, as they do after every killing, that no law
can unfailingly forestall a specific criminal. That is true. They are talking,
many with sincerity, about the constitutional challenges to effective gun
regulation. Those challenges exist. They point out that determined killers
obtained weapons illegally in places like France, England and Norway that have
strict gun laws. Yes, they did.
But at least those countries are trying. The United States is not. Worse,
politicians abet would-be killers by creating gun markets for them, and voters
allow those politicians to keep their jobs. It is past time to stop talking
about halting the spread of firearms, and instead to reduce their number
drastically — eliminating some large categories of weapons and ammunition.
It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment. No
right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.
Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in
California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian
ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and,
yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up
for the good of their fellow citizens.
What better time than during a presidential election to show, at long last, that
our nation has retained its sense of decency?
Would it be absolutely cynical to say the Senate responded to
what appears to be a terrorist mass shooting by declining to ban the sale of
guns to people on the terrorist watch list?
Nah. Let’s go for it.
This week the Senate voted on two proposals to toughen the nation’s gun
regulations in the wake of the San Bernardino murders. The other one would have
tightened loopholes in the background-check law that are currently the size of
the Pacific Ocean. Both failed on basically party-line votes.
“It was a huge victory that there was a vote at all,” said Dan Gross, president
of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, in a telephone conference call.
We normally celebrate winners in this country, but let’s remember the people who
keep trudging toward a noble goal at the top of the political mountain,
oblivious to perpetual landslides. History will someday reward them. Meanwhile,
if you run into a member of the gun control lobby, give him or her hug.
How, you may ask, could anybody be against depriving terrorism suspects of the
right to bear arms? Well, the F.B.I. watch list has, in the past, included some
names through bureaucratic error. The question is which remote possibility you
regard as worse: letting a terrorist buy a gun or temporarily depriving a person
who is not a terrorist of the right to acquire weaponry. Most people in the
Senate, it turns out, are way more worried about making a nonterrorist wait to
get his armaments. Senator John Cornyn of Texas called it “un-American.”
It’s always the same story. The San Bernardino murderers were wielding assault
rifles, with which they were able to fire an estimated 65-75 bullets in rapid
succession. Assault weapons, which seem to be the armament of choice for mass
shootings, used to be illegal under a law that expired in 2004. If the law had
stayed on the books, how many victims would have survived in San Bernardino, or
at the elementary school in Newtown, Conn.? Given the fact that semiautomatic
weapons are totally inappropriate for either hunting or home defense, some of us
would love to trade them for the possibility of reduced casualties next time
somebody decides to go on a rampage.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is an excellent example of the
politicians who totally disagree. Last time an assault weapons ban came up, he
argued that Americans should not be forced to rely on regular slowpoke rifles
“in an environment where the law and order has broken down, whether it’s a
hurricane, national disaster, earthquake, terrorist attack, cyberattack where
the power goes down and the dam’s broken and chemicals have been released into
the air and law enforcement is really not able to respond and people take
advantage of that lawless environment.”
Graham is currently a candidate for president and he is actually not any crazier
on this subject than most of the other Republican contenders. Although possibly
a little more gloomy.
The National Rifle Association got to the power perch it holds today by being
passionately irrational and intransigent, and politicians follow their lead. Gun
control supporters know their voters generally want reasonable controls, not a
universal ban on bullets, so they try to show how evenhanded they are on the
matter. (“I am not a hunter. But I have gone hunting,” said Hillary Clinton in
2008, reminiscing about the days when her dad taught her how to shoot at Lake
Winola outside of Scranton, Pa.) But the opponents try for insane intensity.
When the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a very modest bill that raised
penalties on “straw purchasers” — people who buy guns in order to give them to
someone barred from making the purchase — Senator Cornyn expressed concern that
it could “make it a serious felony for an American Legion employee to
negligently transfer a rifle or firearm to a veteran who, unknown to the
transferor, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.”
People, how many of you are worried about the negligent transferor? But the
argument obviously worked, since the bill — which was aimed at purchasers who
get guns for convicted felons — never even came up for a vote.
In response to the San Bernardino shootings, the Brady Campaign released a video
reminder that an Al Qaeda spokesman, the American-born Adam Yahiye Gadahn, had
once urged supporters in the west to take advantage of the fact that “America is
absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms.” Mr. Gross vowed that the
Brady folk would be “calling out the senators who basically agree with Jihad
Joe.”
That presumes that the senators are more afraid of being lumped with Al Qaeda
than they are afraid of ticking off the N.R.A. Right now, there doesn’t seem to
be a contest.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 5, 2015, on
page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: The Senate Goes Gaga on
Guns.
So far this year, the United States has averaged more than one mass shooting a
day, according to the ShootingTracker website, counting cases of four or more
people shot. And now we have the attack on Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif.,
that killed at least 14 people.
It’s too soon to know exactly what happened in San Bernardino, but just in the
last four years, more people have died in the United States from guns (including
suicides and accidents) than Americans have died in the wars in Korea, Vietnam,
Afghanistan and Iraq combined. When one person dies in America every 16 minutes
from a gun, we urgently need to talk about remedies.
Democrats, including President Obama, emphasize the need to address America’s
problems with guns. Republicans talk about the need to address mental health.
Both are right.
First, guns, the central issue: We need a new public health approach based not
on eliminating guns (that simply won’t happen in a land awash with 300 million
guns) but on reducing the carnage they cause.
We routinely construct policies that reduce the toll of deadly products around
us. That’s what we do with cars (driver’s licenses, seatbelts, guardrails). It’s
what we do with swimming pools (fences, childproof gates, pool covers). It’s
what we do with toy guns (orange tips).
It’s what we should do with real guns.
We can improve public safety without eliminating guns. Switzerland has guns
everywhere because nearly all men spend many years as part-time members of the
armed forces (it’s said that Switzerland doesn’t have an army; it is an army).
Yet while military weapons are ubiquitous, crime is low.
What we should focus on is curbing access to guns among people who present the
greatest risk. An imperative first step is universal background checks to
acquire a gun. New Harvard research suggests that about 40 percent of guns in
America are acquired without a background check — which is just unconscionable.
Astonishingly, it’s perfectly legal even for people on the terrorism watch list
to buy guns in the United States. More than 2,000 terrorism suspects did indeed
purchase guns in the United States between 2004 and 2014, according to the
Government Accountability Office and The Washington Post’s Wonkblog. Democrats
have repeatedly proposed closing that loophole, but the National Rifle
Association and its Republican allies have blocked those efforts, so it’s still
legal.
While Republicans in Congress resist the most basic steps to curb gun access by
violent offenders, the public is much more reasonable. Even among gun owners, 85
percent approve of universal background checks, according to a poll this year.
Likewise, an overwhelming share of gun owners support cracking down on firearms
dealers who are careless or lose track of guns. Majorities of gun owners also
favor banning people under 21 from having a handgun and requiring that guns be
locked up at home.
These are reasonable steps that are, tragically, blocked by the N.R.A. and its
allies. The N.R.A. used to be a reasonable organization. It supported the first
major federal gun law in 1934 and ultimately backed the 1968 Gun Control Act. As
a farm kid growing up in rural Oregon, I received a .22 rifle for my 12th
birthday and took an N.R.A. safety course that, as I recall, came with a
one-year membership. But the N.R.A. has turned into an extremist lobby that
vehemently opposes even steps overwhelmingly backed by gun owners.
As for mental health, Republicans are right that it is sometimes related to gun
violence. But it’s also true that in some cases their budget cuts have reduced
mental health services. To his credit, Representative Tim Murphy, a Pennsylvania
Republican, has introduced a bill that would improve our disastrous mental
health system, perhaps reducing the number of people who snap and turn to
violence. Yet some Democrats are wary of the bill because Republicans like it.
That’s absurd: We need better mental health services just as we need universal
background checks.
It’s not clear what policy, if any, could have prevented the killings in San
Bernardino. Not every shooting is preventable. But we’re not even trying.
When we tackled drunken driving, we took steps like raising the drinking age to
21 and cracking down on offenders. That didn’t eliminate drunken driving, but it
saved thousands of lives.
For similar reasons, Ronald Reagan, hailed by Republicans in every other
context, favored gun regulations, including mandatory waiting periods for
purchases.
“Every year, an average of 9,200 Americans are murdered by handguns,” Reagan
wrote in a New York Times op-ed in 1991 backing gun restrictions. “This level of
violence must be stopped.”
He added that if tighter gun regulations “were to result in a reduction of only
10 or 15 percent of those numbers (and it could be a good deal greater), it
would be well worth making it the law of the land.”
Republicans, listen to your sainted leader.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 3, 2015, on page A35 of the
New York edition with the headline: On Guns, We’re Not Even Trying.
Since no amount of dead bodies seems enough to spur lawmakers to
rein in access to guns, let’s focus on the living — the children gun violence
leaves behind.
Start with the little boy and girl belonging to Jennifer Markovsky, a
35-year-old mother who was one of three people murdered last Friday during the
latest mass shooting of 2015 — this time, a lone gunman’s hourslong siege of a
Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. For the crime of accompanying her
friend to an appointment at the clinic, Ms. Markovsky lost her life in the most
brutal and pointless, yet entirely American, manner.
Here’s a thought for lawmakers who refuse to consider any meaningful legislation
to reduce the daily carnage of gun violence across America: Thanks to your
single-minded defense of unfettered gun rights at the expense of all reason and
respect for life, there is an endless supply of children to be consoled. The
other two victims of Friday’s assault — Garrett Swasey, a police officer, and
Ke’Arre Stewart, an Iraq war veteran — also each had two children.
Of course, children aren’t the only ones who endure this unnecessary suffering.
So do parents and grandparents. Grandchildren and nieces and nephews. Husbands
and wives and brothers and aunts. Lifelong friends and beloved colleagues. Every
life unique and irreplaceable, yet all equally defenseless in the face of a
bullet.
But rather than taking action to address the full measure of destruction
America’s gun violence inflicts, many politicians appear more comfortable
offering rote words of shallow sympathy to the victims’ families, then jumping
quickly behind distractions like the state of mental-health care in America. Was
Robert L. Dear Jr., the suspect in last week’s shooting, mentally ill? Did he
oppose abortion? Or was he just extremely angry?
The truth is, the characteristics of killers may vary, but the result is always
the same — a massacre of the innocent, made possible by virtually unimpeded
access to guns. Mr. Dear had several run-ins with the law and still had plenty
of weapons at hand.
Many who oppose sensible gun-safety measures point to the 350 million or so guns
already in circulation and say it’s too late to turn back now. Their chilling
solution is for everyone to be armed, and ready to shoot, at all times.
Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado was right to call mass shootings “a form of
terrorism.” Even as politicians and those in Congress pump up public fears at
the supposed threat of refugees fleeing Syria, every day in America people —
mostly white men — are walking into movie theaters, restaurants, churches, grade
schools and health care centers armed to the teeth, determined to take as many
people out as they can.
This is not an intractable problem. Countries from Australia to Britain have
dealt with mass shootings quickly and effectively with better laws. As a result,
more of their residents are alive today, and none of those laws have created the
tyrannies that fuel the paranoid fantasies of some activists.
Even in America, where the Second Amendment provides robust protection of gun
rights, there are reforms that modestly brave politicians could pass if they
wanted to, including universal background checks; expanding the categories of
people deemed too dangerous to have guns; funding research into gun violence;
and gun buyback programs.
Instead, the rhetoric on this issue swerves between the irrational and the
deranged. Consider a recent sampling from the leading Republican presidential
candidates. Ben Carson said, “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more
devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” Donald Trump, who once
supported expanding background checks, said the murders in the terrorist attacks
in Paris were connected to France’s strict gun controls. Senator Ted Cruz
suggested Mr. Dear could be a “transgendered leftist activist.” Days earlier he
proudly announced the endorsement of Troy Newman, president of the anti-abortion
group Operation Rescue, who has advocated the execution of doctors who perform
abortions.
Meanwhile, the killings go on. More than once a day on average this year, mass
shootings have destroyed lives and families. President Obama on Saturday said
this endless ritual of murder is “not normal,” but that is precisely the
problem: In America, it has become all too normal.
A version of this editorial appears in print on December 1, 2015,
on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: The Children Left Behind.
President Obama responded angrily on Saturday to the mass
shooting that took three lives, including that of a police officer, at a Planned
Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs over the Thanksgiving holiday, calling
the country’s recurring outbreaks of gun violence “not normal.”
“We can’t let it become normal,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “If we truly
care about this — if we’re going to offer up our thoughts and prayers again, for
God knows how many times, with a truly clean conscience — then we have to do
something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to
people who have no business wielding them. Period. Enough is enough.”
The tragedy quickly found its way into the presidential race, with the
Democratic candidates offering statements of solidarity with Planned Parenthood,
which has faced intense conservative criticism this year, and the Republican
hopefuls largely avoiding mention of the latest outbreak of gun violence.
Mr. Obama, who has voiced rising dismay as he has been forced to repeatedly
respond to mass shootings, sounded notes of deep exasperation about yet another
moment of fear and loss taking place at a time devoted to thanks and family.
“The last thing Americans should have to do, over the holidays or any day, is
comfort the families of people killed by gun violence — people who woke up in
the morning and bid their loved ones goodbye with no idea it would be for the
last time,” he said. “And yet, two days after Thanksgiving, that’s what we are
forced to do again.”
Without calling explicitly for new laws, Mr. Obama invoked the name of the slain
police officer, from the University of Colorado’s Colorado Springs campus, to
plead with leaders to show the will to address such shootings.
“May God bless Officer Garrett Swasey and the Americans he tried to save — and
may He grant the rest of us the courage to do the same thing,” Mr. Obama said.
Previous large-scale shootings have not, however, reshaped the country’s
polarized debate over gun control, and there was little reason to believe that
the Republican-controlled Congress would take up measures to restrict access to
firearms.
The shooting did insert two highly contentious issues, gun control and abortion,
into a presidential campaign that has been dominated by a debate over national
security and Middle Eastern refugees since the terrorist attack on Paris this
month.
By late Saturday morning, though, the response to the violence was notably
one-sided: The Democratic candidates all issued statements noting that they
stood with Planned Parenthood, while few of the Republicans offered any
response.
“Today and every day, we #StandWithPP,” Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote on Twitter,
a reference to Planned Parenthood.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland
said much the same. “I strongly support Planned Parenthood and the work it’s
doing,” Mr. Sanders wrote on Twitter. “I hope people realize that bitter
rhetoric can have unintended consequences.”
Mrs. Clinton has made women’s rights and gender issues central to her campaign.
While largely avoiding direct attacks on her Democratic rivals, she has
pointedly criticized Mr. Sanders, who represents a state with a lot of hunters,
for some of his previous votes that aligned with views of gun-rights advocates.
Democrats largely focused on the gunman’s use of an assault-style weapon,
pleading for tighter limits on firearms. But some prominent figures in the party
did seize on the location of the attack to criticize Republicans, even though
the gunman’s motive remained unclear.
“It is time to stop the demonizing and witch hunts against Planned Parenthood,
its staff and patients, and the lifesaving health care it provides to millions
every day,” said Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California.
Republicans have been largely restrained about quickly responding to mass
shootings, unwilling to weigh in on the role of access to guns. But some of them
argued after previous shootings that if more people were armed, the loss of life
could be mitigated — a case Donald J. Trump made again Saturday.
Mr. Trump did not specifically mention the Colorado mayhem during an hourlong
speech in Sarasota, Fla. He did, however, bring up the assault in Paris and the
attack this year on a military recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tenn. If the
victims had access to guns, he said, “you would have had a totally different
story, would have been a different world, and I can say that about a lot of
these crazy attacks.”
That the killings on Friday took place at a clinic that performs abortions made
the issue even more combustible for the Republican hopefuls, nearly all of whom
oppose abortion rights and many of whom have inveighed against Planned
Parenthood.
Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida said in a statement, “There is no acceptable
explanation for this violence.” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, speaking to reporters
in Lamoni, Iowa, called the shooting “tragic” but made no mention of where it
took place.
“Our prayers right now are with the families, and at this point, the
investigation will reveal — we don’t know the motives of what this murderer,
what those motives were — but whatever they were, it’s unacceptable,” Mr. Cruz
said. “It’s horrific and wrong.”
Mr. Cruz has been among the most vocal candidates pushing to deny federal
funding to Planned Parenthood, even threatening to close down the federal
government over the matter.
Withholding taxpayer dollars from groups that perform abortions has long been a
rallying cry for conservatives, but the effort has been reinvigorated since the
release of secretly recorded videos this summer in which a top official with the
organization was recorded discussing the sale of fetal tissue to researchers.
The issue drew significant attention at a Republican presidential debate in
September, when several candidates condemned the group and Carly Fiorina
described a video of “a formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs
kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”
There is no such scene in the videos captured by an anti-abortion group, the
Center for Medical Progress, but Mrs. Fiorina refused to back off her claims.
She accused Planned Parenthood of waging a “propaganda” attack against her and
improved in the polls. But she has since receded as the contest, dominated by
Mr. Trump and Ben Carson, has moved away from abortion.
In a sign of what is animating the Republican contest, Senator Marco Rubio of
Florida issued a statement Saturday referring to Americans’ being “less safe.”
But he was referring to the expiration Saturday night of a set of controversial
intelligence-gathering laws — an issue on which he has been attacking Mr. Cruz —
and he focused on the threat of the Islamic State.
Matt Flegenheimer contributed reporting.
Find out what you need to know about the 2016 presidential race today, and get
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A version of this article appears in print on November 29, 2015, on page A27 of
the New York edition with the headline: ‘Enough Is Enough,’ Obama Says After the
Latest Outbreak of Gun Violence.
COLORADO SPRINGS — The injured man staggered into the grocery
store, his face and chest bloodied. Customers stopped and stared. “He lifted his
shirt up, and he had holes in his chest,” said Miranda Schilter, 17, who had
been waiting for a drink at an in-store coffee shop.
Just minutes earlier, on Friday morning around 11:30, a gunman had gone to the
parking lot of a Planned Parenthood center here and unleashed a barrage of
bullets, turning a bustling snow-covered shopping center into a tableau of chaos
and fear that lasted for more than five hours.
Ms. Schilter dived behind the coffee counter when the shooting began. A woman
who identified herself as a nurse rushed to help the bloodied man who had just
walked in.
As the nurse held his hand, he told people that he had been shot by a man in the
parking lot between the Planned Parenthood clinic and the grocery store.
“He was just so much in shock,” said Taylor White, 23, who was in the store. “He
was like, ‘Some crazy person out there is shooting people.’ ”
The authorities identified the gunman as Robert L. Dear Jr., 57, a heavily
bearded man with a rifle. The shooting killed three people — including Garrett
Swasey, 44, a University of Colorado at Colorado Springs police officer — and
wounded nine. After holding hundreds of people effectively hostage — at least 24
were evacuated from the Planned Parenthood clinic, and 300 were forced to
shelter in place in the shopping areas nearby — Mr. Dear surrendered and was
taken into custody at 4:52 p.m., the authorities said Saturday.
Two of the dead were civilians whose names were being withheld until Monday,
when autopsies will be completed. Four of the wounded were civilians and five
were law enforcement officers; all were taken to local hospitals to be treated
for gunshot wounds.
People who were caught near the carnage on Friday described an excruciating,
hourslong wait for the police to restore safety — or for the gunman to pierce
their hide-outs. Those inside the clinic holed up in an ultrasound room and
other hideaways. At one point, the police rammed a BearCat armored vehicle into
the Planned Parenthood building and rescued some of the people inside.
Mr. Dear stalked a man who was crawling through the parking lot, apparently
trying to hide, a witness told news outlets. He was focused on the medical
clinic but indiscriminate with his targets, firing his long gun into the
entryway before turning around and shooting through the car windshield of the
witness, a man who was trying to flee after dropping off friends there.
The rampage cut short a busy workday at the clinic, with 30 people signed up for
appointments and many more walking in to pick up prescriptions or get health
screenings.
One of the horrified onlookers was the mayor of Colorado Springs, John Suthers,
who said that the police had been able to watch the siege from their command
center by tapping into Planned Parenthood’s security cameras, a tactic that he
credited with saving lives.
“We could see where the suspect was,” Mr. Suthers said in an interview at
Penrose Hospital as he visited the officers wounded in the attack.
He said that officers had been able to see where people had taken cover and were
able to rescue some of them because they were a distance from the gunman. Mr.
Suthers said he had also watched the end of the raid unfold: The suspect,
wearing a trench coat, hopped over a reception desk, laid his gear and a long
gun on the floor and was grabbed by officers.
“He started yelling that he was ready to give up,” Mr. Suthers said. “His
movements were very deliberate and very calm.”
As the shooting began, employees and customers at businesses near the Planned
Parenthood — a bank, a beauty supply center, a nursing home — quickly locked
their doors, hiding behind walls and sending frantic notes to parents, spouses
and children. Most would remain there for hours, some occasionally catching
glimpses of the prolonged gun battle.
William Carson, 23, of Aspen, Colo., had just gotten out of his car in the
parking lot outside the grocery store, King Soopers, when he heard shots. In
town for Thanksgiving, he had run out for bandages after his mother cut her hand
while making breakfast.
Mr. Carson noticed a number of police cars, but the horror registered only when
he began hearing the gunfire.
“I heard six or seven shots while I was still out of the car,” Mr. Carson said
in a phone interview. “One second in between each shot. Fast, but not machine
gun fast.”
He quickly ducked into the Joint, a chiropractor’s office in the strip mall
north of King Soopers. He saw a cluster of officers behind riot shields moving
north with their guns drawn. Along with a receptionist and four patients, he
spent most of the day following events online and trying to reassure his family.
“I was making plans in my head,” he said. “And I was on the phone with my mom
and my brother and making plans to escape through the back.”
Vicki Cowart, the president of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, said
that it appeared the suspect “broke his way in” to the building, but that she
did not know precisely how the attack had unfolded. She said that abortion
opponents regularly protested on the public street outside the center, shouting
at staff members and patients, but that there had been no specific threats
against the Colorado Springs clinic.
“We had no reason to suspect anything,” she said.
At the grocery store, it took about an hour for officials to determine it was
safe for the bloodied man to leave, several witnesses said.
“He was escorted out of the building to be taken to the hospital,” said Daniel
Robb, 27, who works at the store’s sushi counter.
Officials told the rest of the group to stay behind. Doughnuts and sandwiches
appeared, and Mr. Robb continued rolling sushi, unsure what else to do. Lou
Sears, 64, a veteran of the Vietnam War, found an Iraq war veteran. “We talked
all afternoon,” Mr. Sears said.
Soon, officers arrived at the grocery store, the bank and other establishments,
and told people that it was over. They were loaded onto buses — their cars would
be left in the lot, they were told, to be inspected for bombs — and their
relatives would meet them at a nearby furniture store.
The store filled with waiting parents, spouses and children, who lounged on new
couches amid holiday decorations. Christmas carols played. Snow fell outside.
The buses arrived.
People poured out. Among them was Ms. Schilter, the woman at the grocery store.
Her boyfriend, Jackson Ricker, 18, placed his arms around her waist and his chin
on her shoulder and noted that Ms. Schilter had witnessed a different shooting a
few weeks earlier, when a heavily armed man shot and killed a bicyclist and two
women downtown.
“The first time, she cried,” Mr. Ricker said, looking at his dry-eyed
girlfriend. “She’s a veteran now.”
Jack Healy, Dave Philipps, Kassondra Cloos and Noel Black
contributed reporting from Colorado Springs, and Benjamin Mueller, Ashley
Southall, Jack Begg and Mike McIntire from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on November 29, 2015, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Bustling With Shoppers, Then Gripped by
Chaos in Colorado.
The more that sensational gun violence afflicts the nation, the
more that the myth of the vigilant citizen packing a legally permitted concealed
weapon, fully prepared to stop the next mass shooter in his tracks, is promoted.
This foolhardy notion of quick-draw resistance, however, is dramatically
contradicted by a research project showing that, since 2007, at least 763 people
have been killed in 579 shootings that did not involve self-defense. Tellingly,
the vast majority of these concealed-carry, licensed shooters killed themselves
or others rather than taking down a perpetrator.
The death toll includes 29 mass killings of three or more people by concealed
carry shooters who took 139 lives; 17 police officers shot to death, and — in
the ultimate contradiction of concealed carry as a personal safety factor — 223
suicides. Compared with the 579 non-self-defense, concealed-carry shootings,
there were only 21 cases in which self-defense was determined to be a factor.
The tally by the Violence Policy Center, a gun safety group, is necessarily
incomplete because the gun lobby has been so successful in persuading gullible
state and national legislators that concealed carry is essential to public
safety, thus blocking the extensive data collection that should be mandatory for
an obvious and severe public health problem. For that reason, the center has
been forced to rely largely on news accounts and limited data in 38 states and
the District of Columbia.
More complete research, unimpeded by the gun lobby, would undoubtedly uncover a
higher death toll. But this truly vital information is kept largely from the
public. A Gallup poll this month found 56 percent of Americans said the nation
would be safer if more people carried concealed weapons.
Clearly, concealed carry does not transform ordinary citizens into superheroes.
Rather, it compounds the risks to innocent lives, particularly as state
legislatures, bowing to the gun lobby, invite more citizens to venture out
naïvely with firearms in more and more public places, including restaurants,
churches and schools.
College campuses are the latest goal for the gun lobby — a perverse marketing
campaign after the gun massacre that took 10 lives this month at a community
college in Oregon.
Recent concealed-carry excesses include legal shooters charged by the police
with recklessly pegging a few wild shots at shoplifters and other nonviolent
suspects they see fleeing on public streets. This is dangerous vigilantism that
endangers communities, the police warn, not the mythic self-defense being
peddled as concealed carry.
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A version of this editorial appears in print on October 26, 2015, on page A20 of
the New York edition with the headline: The Concealed-Carry Fantasy.
ROSEBURG, Ore. — President Obama on Friday flew into this mill
town buffeted by the mass shooting at a community college to give solace to
grieving families, but politics and two more deadly shootings on college
campuses threatened to intrude.
“I’ve got some very strong feelings about this because when you talk to these
families, you’re reminded that this could be happening to your child, or your
mom, or your dad, or your relative, or your friend,” said Mr. Obama, standing
next to Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon and Mayor Larry Rich of Roseburg. “And so
we’re going to have to come together as a country to see how we can prevent
these issues from taking place.”
Several hundred people stood outside the gates of the Roseburg airport. Some
held signs and American flags, but most just held cellphones to record the
passage of the presidential motorcade — rarely seen in this hilly, green area.
Many of the signs proclaimed, “Welcome Obama,” but others were more pointed, and
referred to his desire for more gun control. “Gun-free Zones Are for Sitting
Ducks,” said one. Another: “Nothing Trumps Our Liberty.” And one said simply,
“Obama is Wrong.”
The Obama administration is reconsidering some administrative actions to tighten
control over gun sales, including one that would define anyone who sells many
guns at gun shows or online as a commercial seller, requiring that they perform
background checks on potential buyers before completing any transaction. The
measure would at least partly close what is widely known as the “gun-show
loophole.”
Last week, Christopher Harper-Mercer brought six guns and spare ammunition to
Umpqua Community College here and systematically shot and killed nine people and
injured nine others. Hours after the attack, a visibly angry Mr. Obama stood at
the White House and delivered a blistering lecture on the dangers of guns and
the need for legislative limits on them. He said that thoughts and prayers — the
usual expressions of grief — were not enough in the face of such a massacre, and
he promised to politicize the issue for the rest of his presidency.
And on Friday, two more college shootings — one at Northern Arizona University
and another at Texas Southern University that together left two dead and four
injured — provided him the opportunity to hammer home his points.
But in addition to being the nation’s most powerful politician, Mr. Obama is
also its chief official mourner, so he had to seek a balance in a rural town
where guns are popular.
The trip to Roseburg was added to Mr. Obama’s schedule on Monday and, in an
obvious nod to local sentiment, the White House said his meetings with grieving
families would be private.
No speech. No politics. Just shared grief.
It was part of a long process of evolution for the president, who has gradually
put action over grief.
On Jan. 12, 2011, Mr. Obama spoke about the shooting of Representative Gabrielle
Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, and 17 others four days earlier and said that it
was time “for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with
each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.”
In July 2012, two days after a gunman walked into a movie theater near Denver
and killed 12, Mr. Obama said his “main task was to serve as a representative of
the entire country and let them know that we are thinking about them at this
moment.”
And two days after the shooting of 26 people, mostly children, at Sandy Hook
Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Mr. Obama said, “These tragedies must end,
and to end them, we must change.”
Just hours after the shooting in Roseburg, Mr. Obama quickly set grief aside.
“This is a political choice that we make to allow this to happen every few
months in America,” he said in an unusually abrupt and often angry speech.
But last week’s rampage has actually tightened the embrace of guns for many
here.
Some prominent residents, including the publisher of a local weekly newspaper,
said Mr. Obama was not welcome. The language got so angry that on Tuesday, the
mayor and other city officials put out a statement saying they welcomed Mr.
Obama and “will extend him every courtesy.”
That was evident when the governor, Ms. Brown, greeted Mr. Obama at the airport.
As his motorcade sped through town, an unusual number of people along the side
of the road waved pleasantly.
Then Mr. Obama met with the victims’ families in the arts building of Roseburg
High School, where flowers had been placed beside trees in a school courtyard.
After nearly an hour with the families, Mr. Obama offered federal assistance to
help the community “heal from this loss.”
In barely audible remarks he then said something had to be done, before quickly
turning back to expressions of grief and support.
“But today, it’s about the families and their grief, and the love we feel for
them,” he said. “And they surely do appreciate all the support that they’ve
received.”
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A version of this article appears in print on October 10, 2015, on page A12 of
the New York edition with the headline: Obama Consoles Families in Oregon Amid
Two More Campus Shootings.
HOUSTON — Two students were killed in separate shootings Friday
on college campuses in Texas and Arizona, rattling the nerves of students,
teachers and parents eight days after a rampage left 10 people dead at Umpqua
Community College in Oregon.
Unlike the attack in Oregon and other mass shootings at colleges and schools in
recent years, the two on Friday were not so-called active-shooter episodes, but
instead appeared to stem from ordinary disputes and altercations that quickly
turned violent.
Here in Houston, a shooting outside a student housing complex at Texas Southern
University shortly before noon put the campus on lockdown and led administrators
to cancel classes for the day. The motive was unknown, but one student was
killed and another man wounded. Their names were not released.
The shooting appeared to be the fourth on or near the campus since August, and
although officials said two people had been detained, the suspect believed to be
the gunman remained at large.
Hours earlier, in Flagstaff, Ariz., a college freshman was taken into custody
after he shot four people, killing one, near a residence hall at Northern
Arizona University, officials said. Gregory T. Fowler, chief of the campus
police department, said the student, Steven Jones, 18, opened fire after two
groups of students were involved in a confrontation. The police took Mr. Jones
into custody after he stopped firing and “everything calmed down for a few
minutes,” Chief Fowler said.
A student, Colin Brough, was killed, and the three wounded students were
identified by the university as Nicholas Prato, Kyle Zientek and Nicholas
Piring.
Security experts said it was hard to draw broad lessons from episodes like those
on Friday, given the contradictory national trends of recent years. Gun sales
have risen sharply, but the percentage of households with guns has not.
Homicides over all are down, but mass shootings are up, though still uncommon.
“There’s a distinction, of course, between someone who just sets out to kill a
large number of people and shootings that come out of altercations, which
unfortunately do happen pretty regularly,” said S. Daniel Carter of the VTV
Family Outreach Foundation, which was created by families of victims of the 2007
massacre at Virginia Tech. “They typically don’t get national coverage, except
in the wake of something like what happened in Oregon.”
Whether campuses are more or less safe over all than they were years ago is
unclear, said Mr. Carter, director of the foundation’s 32 National Campus Safety
Initiative. Experts agree, however, that schools and law enforcement have become
better at reacting to “active shooter” episodes. Police officers find and
confront gunmen faster, and schools are quicker to send out emergency alerts,
put campuses on lockdown and advise people to hunker down.
Officials at Texas Southern University called for a campuswide lockdown quickly,
after it appeared that a possible suspect had escaped through the apartment
complex. The shooting happened in the parking lot of the complex at Texas
Southern, one of the largest historically black colleges in the country, with
nearly 11,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The campus is in a section of
Houston called the Third Ward, which struggles with poverty and crime.
Jodi Silva, a spokeswoman for the Houston Police Department, said it was too
early to say whether the attack was connected to the other recent shootings at
the university.
“We’re looking into all those aspects,” she said.
Overnight on Thursday, a shooting had occurred in the vicinity of the same
housing complex, the Tierwester Oaks/University Courtyard apartments, and one
man was treated at a hospital and released. On Tuesday evening, one person was
shot during an argument on a campus thoroughfare called Tiger Walk.
And in late August, two people were shot after a man fired into a crowd near
where the shooting on Friday took place. In that case, a university officer
responding to a disturbance in the student-housing parking lot saw the man fire
and told him to drop the gun, but the man turned toward the officer, the
authorities said. The officer fired but missed, and the suspect, identified by
the police as Darrius T. Nichols, 20, surrendered. Mr. Nichols was charged with
murder after one of the two victims, LaKeytrick Quinn, 24, died. The second
victim, a woman, was treated and released.
After four shootings in six weeks, two of them fatal, students were stunned and
concerned by the violence. A group of them stood Friday outside a gate to the
apartment complex, where police cars filled the edges of the crime scene.
“Instead of the conversations being, ‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ our
conversations are, ‘What can we do to fix it?’ ” said Tyler Doggett, 21, a
senior. “Texas Southern University has faced adversity before, and it’s nothing
we can’t overcome as a family.”
University officials said the campus police department was increasing its
presence and would continue to work closely with Houston-area law enforcement
agencies.
The man who survived the shooting on Friday was transported to a hospital with
two gunshot wounds to his upper torso. He was in stable condition.
The wounded students in Arizona were being treated at Flagstaff Medical Center.
Chief Fowler would not confirm their conditions.
A statement on the university’s website said the shooting occurred just after 1
a.m. on the Flagstaff campus, which has about 20,000 students, 140 miles north
of Phoenix. It took place near Mountain View Hall, which houses most of the
school’s fraternities and sororities.
All four victims were members of Delta Chi, the fraternity’s executive director,
Justin P. Sherman, said in an email. Mr. Jones, the gunman, was not a member of
Delta Chi, and it was unclear whether he was part of the school’s Greek system.
An Instagram account bearing pictures that match Mr. Jones’s mug shot is laden
with vulgar comments and shows a young man with an apparent interest in nice
clothes, expensive cars, girls and guns. One photo shows him wearing clothing
printed with the American flag and holding a firearm over his shoulder.
Arizona is an open-carry state whose voters have been strongly opposed to gun
control measures in the past. But Northern Arizona University generally
prohibits weapons, with a few exceptions: Guns are allowed in vehicles, for
example, if they are stowed.
Politicians in Arizona quickly released statements about the shooting but did
not approach the topic of gun control. “All Arizonans have the #Flagstaff
community in their hearts today,” Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, wrote on
Twitter.
Reporting was contributed by Richard Pérez-Peña, Katie Rogers and
Liam Stack from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on October 10, 2015, on page A15 of
the New York edition with the headline: Campus Shootings in Texas and Arizona
Kill 2 Students and Wound 4.
It passed with little notice when an 11-year-old boy shot and
killed an 8-year-old girl a few days ago in Tennessee — shot her because she
wouldn’t show him her puppy. The boy used his family’s 12-gauge shotgun to kill
the second-grader.
It passed, as these things do in a country that accepts more than 33,000 deaths
by gunfire every year, because we now live by an Onion headline that’s long
ceased to be satirical: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This
Regularly Happens.”
The latest mass shooting, in Roseburg, Ore., was followed by cowardice and
rationalizations from leading politicians and would-be politicians. Donald
Trump, who has an answer for everything, said nothing could be done, because
“It’s the mind that does the shooting.” Jeb Bush shrugged and said, “stuff
happens.”
And Ben Carson implied that the nine victims in the community college massacre
were somewhat to blame because of their passivity during a split-second of
life-ending horror. Carson was ignorant of the actions of an Army veteran, Chris
Mintz, who tried to stop the Roseburg killer and was shot seven times.
Carson, who is a crackpot on political issues, then went one further, claiming
absolutist gun rights are more important than human lives: “I never saw a body
with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm
ourselves away.”
So don’t look for solutions from the political system, which can’t even produce
a background check measure supported by 90 percent of citizens. The system is
not only broken, but rigged on behalf of a lobby of fanatics who control one
political party, forcing it to respond to mass killings with ever more
incoherent statements.
We should look, instead, to the mothers of America. The politics have to be
replaced by the personal.
Can we blame the mother of Adam Lanza, who let a mentally disturbed child arm
himself to the teeth just before he slaughtered 20 children and six adults in
Newtown? The home was an arsenal, supplied in part by the mother.
Can we blame the mother of the Oregon shooter for letting her troubled son
surround himself with 14 guns? Like Lanza, the attacker was a loner, with
imaginary enemies, suicidal at times. What reasonable person would allow him to
assemble more than a dozen guns, including assault rifles?
Oh, but it’s a chance to bond, mother and child over guns. There are so many
nonlethal ways to bond — hike, cook, give the child a camera and tell him to
capture life. Yes, the Roseburg shooter was an adult. He could legally buy his
own weapons. Still, he was living with his mother, the one person who should
know him better than anyone. She may have been blinded by her own obsession with
guns, as evidenced from her social media postings.
Only in a country with a pathological refusal to recognize the truth about
weapons and deaths would parents arm their mentally unstable children.
In two-thirds of the nation’s school shootings, the attackers used guns from the
home or a relative’s residence. Shootings rank near the top as a leading cause
of death among children and teens, and 60 percent of those occur in the home.
But just as we can fault mothers in many cases, we can look to them for our
salvation. Take it from Liza Long, a Boise, Idaho, mother of three, who produced
a blog, “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” that went viral after the 2012 Newtown
shootings. “I live with a son who is mentally ill,” she wrote. “I love my son.
But he terrifies me.” She says she would never have a gun in her home.
To be clear, mental illness does not equal violence. But having guns around
people who are likely to do harm to themselves or others is madness. And it can
be stopped.
What about the fathers? Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said the Oregon shooter’s
father, divorced and absent for some time from his son, was “a failure” who
“owes us all an apology.” Fathers certainly have an equal responsibility. But
it’s the mothers, in most cases, who know the names of their children’s
teachers, who understand their deepest fears, who have a unique relationship.
A group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, was formed after the
Newtown carnage. It’s a good counter to the creepy cultists of the gun culture.
Their best appeal is likely to be one of reason to the hearts of fellow mothers,
rather than to heartless politicians at the legislative level.
On Friday, President Obama will try to console some of the mothers in Oregon
whose children were murdered in a community college writing class. He will be
following in the footsteps of Robert F. Kennedy, who was in Roseburg 47 year
ago, warning about violent people buying guns through the mail. A few weeks
later, he was assassinated by a crazed gunman. Nothing’s changed.
In embracing the mothers, the president who never knew a father can be part of a
new effort — a personal plea to those who don’t need the gun lobby’s permission
to do the right thing.
Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and now, a community
college in Roseburg, Ore. One after another, mass shootings have horrified the
nation, stoking debate about the availability of legal guns and anguish over the
inability of society to keep weapons out of the hands of seething killers.
But such rampage killings are not the typical face of gun violence in America.
Each day, some 30 people are victims of gun homicides, slain by rival gang
members or drug dealers, trigger-happy robbers, drunken men after bar fights,
frenzied family members or abusive partners. An additional 60 people a day kill
themselves with guns.
In Chicago alone in September — the city’s deadliest month in recent years —
there were 57 homicides, most by gunfire, and 351 were shot and wounded. In
total, counting suicides, 33,636 people in the United States were killed by
firearms in 2013, according to the latest federal data.
“Mass shootings focus the public’s attention,” said Garen J.
Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the
University of California, Davis, School of Medicine. “But we lose on the order
of 90 people a day to firearms. We need to keep our eyes focused on the larger
picture.”
Yet there is bitter disagreement over how to respond in this gun-saturated
country and, especially in the current political campaign, over whether
expanded, tougher background checks would make a difference.
Complicating any solutions is a stark reality about the origins of many of the
guns used in crimes. Most of the up to 300 million guns in the United States,
now kept by at least a third of American households, were bought legally, but
few criminals obtained their firearms that way, turning instead to an
underground market.
In the largest federal survey of prison inmates on the subject, done in 2004,
only about 10 percent of convicts who had carried guns said they bought them
from licensed dealers. Most said they bought them from, or traded with,
relatives, friends or street acquaintances such as fences, drug dealers and gang
members.
Gun theft is a major source of such weapons. Evidence suggests that at least
250,000 guns are stolen in home and store burglaries each year. Some
criminologists say the number may be significantly higher.
Once weapons start circulating in this underworld, they tend to change hands
frequently, said Philip J. Cook, a professor of public policy at Duke
University.
Two years ago, Mr. Cook questioned 100 prisoners in the Cook County, Ill., jail
about how they obtained weapons. Some of the Chicago-area inmates said they had
purchased from traffickers from another state, or sent fellow gang members to
Indiana or other states where gun laws are looser. Many of those questioned
stressed the primacy of family, friends and fellow gang members as sources of
guns. They said they were reluctant to deal with strangers, fearing a police
sting or the purchase of a “dirty” gun that could link them to a crime.
In some gangs, the inmates said, gun sharing is common; 15 youths in a
neighborhood might have access to four guns, as needed. Guns may also be given
as gifts to friends or comrades getting out of prison.
Conservative opponents argue that controls on legal firearm sales cannot
directly keep firearms away from criminals.
Yet applying background checks to private gun sales as well as commercial ones,
with stronger criteria for denying purchases, remains a top goal of many gun
control advocates and scholars who study firearms violence. They point to major
gaps in the current system of checks as well as evidence that extending checks
to private transactions can slow the flow of weapons into the underground
market.
The issue has flared up in the presidential campaign. President Obama and some
Democrats — Hillary Rodham Clinton among them — have called for universal
background checks as an important step. Many of the Republican candidates join
pro-gun groups in arguing that such rules will hinder only law-abiding citizens.
A primary concern of those calling for expanded checks is the absence in most
states of any vetting procedure when a gun is purchased from a private party — a
friend, a seller advertising online, a small-scale seller at a gun show. By
federal law, background checks are required only for purchases from licensed
dealers; people with felony records or certain official records of mental
illness are barred from buying.
A significant minority of guns are acquired legally but without background
checks, which many authorities call a worrisome loophole. In a national survey
of more than 2,000 gun owners, conducted this year by the Harvard School of
Public Health and not yet published, 40 percent of owners said they had acquired
their most recent firearm without a background check. While in some cases these
guns were inherited or given by relatives, most of them were purchased, said
Deborah Azrael, one of the study’s leaders.
Seventeen states have established their own checking system and also applied it
to private handgun transactions.
Daniel Webster, an expert on gun violence at the Johns Hopkins University Center
for Gun Policy and Research, cites two recent examples as evidence that expanded
background checks can affect gun markets and violence.
In 2007, Missouri ended a decades-old system of background checks and licensing
for handgun purchases, including private sales. According to research by Mr.
Webster and colleagues, the change quickly led to an increase in gun diversions
to criminals and to a 25 percent increase in firearm homicides over the three
years that followed, while homicides committed by other means did not rise.
In contrast, Connecticut in 1995 extended background checks to private sales and
established a handgun permit system. Over 10 years, the rate of gun murders fell
by 40 percent.
“There is a connection between regulating the formal market and the number of
guns that enter the underground market,” Mr. Webster said. A large share of
violent criminals, he added, are “dirt-poor,” and to them, price matters.
Still, general controls on gun sales may do little, by themselves, to block a
determined mass killer.
In the shooting last week in Oregon, in which Christopher Harper-Mercer killed
nine people, all 14 of the guns available to him — either used in the attack or
left at home — were bought legally by him or by a relative from a licensed
dealer.
“This is the sort of killing you’re least likely to prevent with gun control
laws, partly because the killers are so motivated,” said Gary Kleck, a
criminologist at Florida State University.
But a new initiative in California is directed specifically at such people. In a
law that will take effect in January, family members or the police will be able
to ask a judge for a temporary gun violence restraining order if they see
someone in an ominous emotional spiral, threatening violence and perhaps
collecting weapons.
Disputes over civil liberties appear likely. But with legal procedures modeled
on restraining orders for domestic violence, the law says, officials could
obtain a search warrant and seize the person’s guns for a brief period, pending
evaluation.
The idea builds on “threat assessment” efforts by some schools and police
departments, which focus on people seen as threatening. Support for the idea
grew after a deadly rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., last year.
Before the rampage, the family of the gunman, Elliot O. Rodger, had feared that
he was becoming dangerous and had even notified law enforcement. Officers
visited him but saw no evidence of mental illness that would warrant taking any
action. They did not check his gun purchase records or search his home.
“If they had searched, they’d have found not only three guns, but 40 loaded
magazines,” said Dr. Wintemute of the University of California, Davis.
“That would have just screamed, ‘Trouble coming!’ ” he said.
ROSEBURG, Ore. — When a downstairs neighbor of Laurel Harper
learned there was a gunman on the loose at Umpqua Community College here, he ran
up to tell her, knowing that her son, Christopher Harper-Mercer, was a student
there. Like other parents, Ms. Harper started to set out in a desperate search,
fearing her son could be hurt.
“She was very upset,” said the neighbor, who asked not to be named, citing his
family’s privacy.
But as she was leaving, the sheriff and his deputies intercepted her and broke
the news that her son was the gunman.
Ms. Harper, who divorced her husband a decade ago, appears to have been by far
the most significant figure in her son’s troubled life; neighbors say he rarely
left their apartment. Unlike his father, who said on television that he had no
idea Mr. Harper-Mercer cared so deeply about guns, his mother was well aware of
his fascination. In fact, she shared it: In a series of online postings over a
decade, Ms. Harper, a nurse, said she kept numerous firearms in her home and
expressed pride in her knowledge about them, as well as in her son’s expertise
on the subject.
She also opened up about her difficulties raising a son who used to bang his
head against the wall, and said that both she and her son struggled with
Asperger’s syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. She tried to counsel others
whose children faced similar problems. All the while, she expressed hope that
her son could lead a successful life in finance or as a filmmaker.
Ms. Harper did not respond to messages seeking comment.
In an online forum, answering a question about state gun laws several years ago,
Ms. Harper took a jab at “lame states” that impose limits on keeping loaded
firearms in the home, and noted that she had AR-15 and AK-47 semiautomatic
rifles, along with a Glock handgun. She also indicated that her son, who lived
with her, was well versed in guns, citing him as her source of information on
gun laws, saying he “has much knowledge in this field.”
“I keep two full mags in my Glock case. And the ARs & AKs all have loaded mags,”
Ms. Harper wrote. “No one will be ‘dropping’ by my house uninvited without
acknowledgement.”
Law enforcement officials have said they recovered 14 firearms and spare
ammunition magazines that were purchased legally either by Mr. Harper-Mercer,
26, or an unnamed relative. Mr. Harper-Mercer had six guns with him when he
entered a classroom building on Thursday and started firing on a writing class
in which he was enrolled; the rest were found in the second-floor apartment he
shared with his mother.
Ms. Harper’s posts were found on Yahoo Answers, a site where she spent hours
over the last 10 years, mostly answering medical questions from strangers,
occasionally citing her own difficulties raising a troubled child. Her Yahoo
profile had a user name of TweetyBird, accompanied by a cartoon image of a
nurse. In many of her postings, she included her email address, which public
records link to Ms. Harper.
Ms. Harper and Christopher’s father, Ian Mercer of Tarzana, Calif., divorced in
2006 and were separated years earlier. Mr. Mercer told CNN last week that he
thought the nation should change its gun laws, saying the massacre “would not
have happened” if his son had not been able to buy so many handguns and rifles.
Neighbors in Southern California have said that Ms. Harper and her son would go
to shooting ranges together, something Ms. Harper seemed to confirm in one of
her online posts. She talked about the importance of firearms safety and said
she learned a lot through target shooting, expressing little patience with
unprepared gun owners: “When I’m at the range, I cringe every time the
‘wannabes’ show up.”
In addition to talking about guns, Ms. Harper, 64, was a prolific commenter in
online forums dealing with medical issues, frequently answering questions from
strangers with a tone of empathy and concern. She expressed having expertise in
autism, saying that both she and her son — whom she never identified by name —
had Asperger’s syndrome.
Consoling another parent seeking help with disruptive behavior by an autistic
child, Ms. Harper said that her own son “was, among other things, a head-banger”
when he was younger and was initially given a misdiagnosis of attention deficit
disorder. But over time, he had learned to cope and was doing better, she wrote:
“I was in your shoes and now my son’s in college.”
She expressed frustration with people who questioned how successful a person
with autism could be, noting: “I have Asperger’s and I didn’t do so bad. Wasn’t
easy (understatement) but it can be done.” She also said she had “dealt with it
on a daily basis for years and years” because of her son, who she said was
progressing well.
“He’s no babbling idiot nor is his life worthless,” Ms. Harper wrote. “He’s very
intelligent and is working on a career in filmmaking. My 18 years worth of
experience with and knowledge about Asperger’s syndrome is paying off.”
Alexis Jefferson, who worked with Ms. Harper at a Southern California subacute
care center around 2010, said the gunman’s mother sometimes confided the
difficulties she had in raising her son, including that she had placed Mr.
Harper-Mercer in a psychiatric hospital when he did not take his medication.
“She said that ‘my son is a real big problem of mine,’ ” Ms. Jefferson said in a
telephone interview. “She said: ‘He has some psychological problems. Sometimes
he takes his medication, sometimes he doesn’t. And that’s where the big problem
is, when he doesn’t take his medication.’ ”
Ms. Jefferson said Ms. Harper had described bringing her son to the Del Amo
Behavioral Health System in Torrance, Calif., near where they had lived before
moving to Oregon.
“He calls and says, ‘Take me out, take me out,’ ” Ms. Jefferson said, recalling
her conversations with Ms. Harper. “She didn’t take him out until the doctor
said he was ready to get out.”
One piece of advice Ms. Harper dispensed online for a parent with an autistic
infant was to start reading to the child as soon as possible and to use
expressive gestures. An online posting from six years ago included the unlikely
revelation that she used to read to her son a book by Donald J. Trump, the real
estate mogul now running for president, who recently suggested that childhood
vaccines cause autism — a claim Ms. Harper dismisses in her postings.
“Fact: Before my son was even born, I was reading out loud to him from Donald
Trump’s ‘The Art of the Deal,’” she wrote. “And as for the ‘gesture effect,’ I
was practically a mime. And now my son invests in the stock market along with
me, turns a profit and is working on a degree in finance. His language and
reading skills are phenomenal. I tell you this because it’s not too late for you
to start helping your daughter.”
It is not clear where — or if — Mr. Harper-Mercer had pursued such a degree.
Little has been disclosed about his studies at Umpqua. In California, Mr.
Harper-Mercer was enrolled at El Camino College from 2010 to 2012, but officials
there would not confirm whether he obtained any degree or certification. Both
son and mother moved to Oregon about two years ago; Mr. Mercer said he had not
seen either of them since then.
Neighbors in the apartment building here where the mother and son lived said
that Mr. Harper-Mercer rarely strayed far. They would see him getting the mail
or walking down the road to buy a soda at a market, but said he did not appear
to have a job in Roseburg and stayed home most of the day.
At night, when his mother went to her nursing jobs, a neighbor whose bedroom was
directly below Mr. Harper-Mercer’s frequently heard him pacing until 3 or 4 in
the morning, the neighbor said. She complained to her own family about the
noise, but never mentioned it to Mr. Harper-Mercer or his mother.
In an interview in their ground-floor apartment, the neighbor, a young woman,
and her mother echoed other people’s memories of Mr. Harper-Mercer as quiet and
distant.
They said Ms. Harper had occasionally invited them upstairs for a visit, or when
she was writing a complaint letter to the apartment managers about the smell of
marijuana smoke or late-night guests at another neighbor’s apartment. She would
ask her son to say hello, but he rarely chatted with them.
“Chris would just be in his room,” the young woman said.
The young woman’s mother, who immigrated from the Philippines, said that she had
shared Filipino meals with Ms. Harper, and that Ms. Harper had taught her how to
drive. She wrote a letter of support when Ms. Harper was applying for a $1,500
scholarship to continue her nursing studies. The family still has Ms. Harper’s
thank you card.
“Once again, thank you so very much for helping me with my scholarship
application,” the note says. “Now I can attend the nursing program without
having to stress out about tuition!”
The day of the shooting, the young woman from downstairs rushed home to check on
her toddler, and saw Ms. Harper standing outside talking with the police. It was
Ms. Harper’s son who had killed nine people and wounded several others before
exchanging fire with the police and then taking his own life.
“She was still in denial of it,” the young woman said. “She just handled it like
a nurse would — like it was another person’s life.”
Correction: October 6, 2015
An earlier version of this article described Laurel Harper’s employment
incorrectly. She is a licensed practical nurse; she is not a registered nurse.
Jack Healy and Julie Turkewitz reported from Roseburg, and Mike McIntire from
New York. Ian Lovett contributed reporting from Torrance. Calif.
A version of this article appears in print on October 6, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: Mother Wrote of Troubled Son and Gun Rights.
AN angry and exasperated President Obama, speaking to the nation
last Thursday after the slaughter in Roseburg, Ore., made one oblique reference
to the National Rifle Association, asking gun owners to question whether their
“views are properly being represented by the organization that suggests it’s
speaking for you.”
It’s a fair question, and not only because the N.R.A. has single-handedly
dictated the shape of the debate over guns for decades. Whether they own guns or
not, Americans should understand the outsize role the N.R.A. plays, not only in
thwarting sensible gun safety laws but also in undermining law enforcement by
abetting gun traffickers, criminal gun dealers and criminal gun users.
The N.R.A., which claims some 4.5 million members, often professes to speak for
all gun owners — hunters, sportsmen, collectors and ordinary Americans who keep
guns for self-defense. But on some issues, most gun owners clearly reject the
party line.
In 2012, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz found that 87 percent of gun owners
supported criminal background or “Brady” checks for all gun purchases. Following
the December 2012 massacre of 20 children in Newtown, Conn., another poll showed
that 92 percent of Americans supported background checks for all buyers,
including those buying on the Internet and at gun shows.
But by April 2013, when the Senate considered a bill to do just that, the N.R.A.
campaign to defeat it was in full swing. The N.R.A. tagged the bill as a top
priority and made clear that senators who opposed it risked receiving a low
N.R.A. rating, which many of its single-issue supporters use in deciding how to
vote, or a flood of negative television ads.
Licensed gun dealers slated to run the new background checks would have reaped
millions, as thousands of new customers would have been sent to their stores.
But like many members of Congress — who cower in fear of the ratings system and
negative campaign advertising — the dealers knew not to cross the N.R.A. So the
measure went down, with opponents arguing that criminals don’t bother submitting
to background checks.
That story wasn’t quite accurate, though. Since some background checks were
first implemented in 1994, gun dealers have turned away more than two million
felons, drug users, unauthorized immigrants and other “prohibited persons,”
according to a report by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
When the organization’s chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, calls the N.R.A. “one
of the largest law enforcement organizations in the country,” nothing could be
further from the truth.
Consider, for example, the federal law requiring licensed gun dealers to notify
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives when a single purchaser
buys two or more handguns within five days. The A.T.F. knows that multiple
purchases are an indicator of trafficking, and that traffickers can evade the
law by making a single purchase from five, 10 or 20 different gun stores. So why
doesn’t the A.T.F. crosscheck those purchases? Because Congress, under pressure
from the N.R.A., prevents the federal government from keeping a centralized
database that could instantly identify multiple sales. Gun sale records are
instead inconveniently “archived” by the nation’s gun dealers at 60,000 separate
locations — the stores or residences of the nation’s federally licensed gun
dealers, with no requirement for digital records.
Rather than preventing crimes by identifying a trafficker before he sells guns
to potentially lethal criminals, the A.T.F. has to wait until the police recover
those guns from multiple crime scenes. Then law enforcement officials can begin
the laborious process of tracing each gun from the manufacturer or importer to
various middlemen, the retail seller, the original retail purchaser and one or
more subsequent buyers.
Meanwhile, dealers who work with traffickers are protected by another
N.R.A.-backed measure that ensures that firearms dealers do not have to maintain
inventories.
Think about that: A car dealer keeps an inventory to know when cars go missing
so the police can track them down as quickly as possible. Why the lack of
curiosity among gun dealers? Well, gun dealers must report lost and stolen guns
to the A.T.F. because large numbers of missing weapons are a red flag for
trafficking. Without an inventory requirement, it’s easier to sell guns off the
books.
Do most gun owners want the N.R.A. to protect criminal dealers? I doubt it.
The A.T.F., which has helped convict tens of thousands of gun criminals, has of
course been a perennial target of the N.R.A., and the lobbying group has worked
relentlessly to limit the A.T.F.’s budget and strangle its operations.
Today’s A.T.F. operates with about the same number of agents as it did 40 years
ago, fewer than the number of officers in the Washington, D.C., police force,
yet it is charged with investigating violations of federal gun, arson, explosive
and other laws nationwide.
Since the N.R.A. seems to loathe the A.T.F., one might think it would work to
disband it or have its mission performed by an agency like the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, with its more polished and professional public image. But the
N.R.A. prefers the hobbled A.T.F. just as it is, and every year it helps ensure
that Congress approves legislation banning the transfer of A.T.F. operations to
any other agency.
You don’t get much more cynical than that.
Since his daughter, the journalist Alison Parker, was shot dead in August while
presenting an on-air broadcast, Andy Parker has been on a campaign to “shame”
lawmakers whom he says are “cowards and in the pockets of the N.R.A.” Some of
those lawmakers might prove to be less cowardly if they understood that the
N.R.A. was no longer the voice of law-abiding gun owners, but rather a voice for
criminals.
Alan Berlow, who has written frequently about the National Rifle
Association, is the author of “Dead Season: A Story of Murder and Revenge.”
ROSEBURG, Ore. — The father of the gunman who killed nine people
at a community college here called on the nation to change its gun laws on
Saturday, saying the massacre “would not have happened” if his son had not been
able to buy so many handguns and rifles.
“How was he able to compile that kind of arsenal?” the father, Ian Mercer, said
in an interview with CNN at his home in Tarzana, Calif. He said he had no idea
that his son owned more than a dozen firearms.
His comments came as officials here confirmed that the gunman, Christopher
Harper-Mercer, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after exchanging fire with
police officers who responded to the shooting at Umpqua Community College on
Thursday morning.
As grieving families across this hilly corner of southwest Oregon made plans to
bury their dead and tended to wounded relatives at area hospitals on Saturday,
investigators offered a few new details of the rampage. A new timeline of the
response to the shooting showed that officers arrived five minutes after the
first 911 calls. Two minutes later, they had engaged Mr. Harper-Mercer. Two
minutes after that, they reported, the shooter was down.
Criminal histories and documented mental health problems did not prevent at
least eight of the gunmen in 14 recent mass shootings from obtaining their
weapons.
They also said they had found another gun at Mr. Harper-Mercer’s apartment, the
14th they had confiscated. Mr. Harper-Mercer, a student at the community
college, was armed with six guns, spare ammunition magazines and body armor when
he walked into a writing class and opened fire around 10:30 a.m. Thursday. All
of the weapons had been purchased legally by Mr. Harper-Mercer or a relative,
law-enforcement officials have said.
Despite Mr. Harper-Mercer’s online interest in high-profile shootings and
neighbors’ memories of him as an enthusiastic gun collector who frequently went
target shooting with his mother, the gunman’s father told CNN he did not know
his son owned guns.
Mr. Harper-Mercer’s parents divorced a decade ago, and he had lived with his
mother. The father said he had not seen his son since he and his mother, Laurel
Harper, moved to Oregon about two years ago, but said there was no “disharmony
or any bitterness” between him and his son.
Adding a raw, personal voice to the debate over gun control in the wake of this
latest mass shooting, he said the United States needed to tighten gun laws.
“It has to change,” he said. “How can it not? Even people that believe in the
right to bear arms, what right do you have to take someone’s life?” He would not
discuss his son’s mental health issues, deferring to the police investigation.
“Obviously, someone who goes and kills nine people has to have some kind of
issue,” he said.
Standing on his lawn, Mr. Mercer said the shooting had devastated his family.
“But we’re not alone in this,” he said. “My heart goes out to all the families
that were affected by this.”
His interview came on the same afternoon that relatives of one of the students
wounded in his son’s rampage also stepped in front of the microphones, here
outside the front doors of Mercy Medical Center in Roseburg.
Bonnie Schaan, the mother of Cheyeanne Fitzgerald, said that her daughter had
been shot in the back during the massacre in her classroom. Tears welled up in
her eyes as she explained that a bullet had clipped her daughter’s lung and
lodged in one of her kidneys, which had to be removed. Cheyeanne, 16, a nursing
student, remains in intensive care.
Mr. Harper-Mercer asked the young woman about her religion, according to her
aunt, Colleen Fitzgerald, but “she didn’t answer.” Instead, Cheyeanne played
dead next to her friend, Anastasia Boylan, a student who was also shot. Ms.
Schaan said that her daughter did not know Mr. Harper-Mercer. After hearing the
news about the shooting on campus, Ms. Schaan said she texted her daughter and
said, “I’m on my way to school.” Instead she went to the hospital.
Cheyeanne has begun to talk with her father about the ordeal, Ms. Schaan said.
Now, even a chair being moved unsettles her. Her mother added, “She’s mentioned
all the blood.”
Dr. Jason Gray, the chief medical officer at Mercy Medical Center, said only two
victims were still in the hospital. One was in critical condition and the other
in fair condition. They were expected to be released in two to five days.
The hospital treated seven victims in total, Dr. Gray said. Two were released
Thursday, four went into surgery and one died in the emergency department. Three
other people were being treated for wounds at PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical
Center at RiverBend in the town of Springfield.
On Friday, about 300 people showed up at Mercy Medical Center to donate blood,
Dr. Gray said. The hospital set up a donation station nearby to handle the
crowd.
Correction: October 3, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated the town in which Ian Mercer lives.
It is Tarzana, Calif., not Torrance.
Claire Cain Miller contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on October 4, 2015, on page A24 of
the New York edition with the headline: Gunman’s Father Says Tougher Laws Would
Have Prevented Massacre.
We’ve mourned too often, seen too many schools and colleges
devastated by shootings, watched too many students get an education in grief.
It’s time for a new approach to gun violence.
We’re angry, but we also need to be smart. And frankly, liberal efforts, such as
the assault weapons ban, were poorly designed and saved few lives, while brazen
talk about banning guns just sparked a backlash that empowered the National
Rifle Association.
What we need is an evidence-based public health approach — the same model we use
to reduce deaths from other potentially dangerous things around us, from
swimming pools to cigarettes. We’re not going to eliminate guns in America, so
we need to figure out how to coexist with them.
First, we need to comprehend the scale of the problem: It’s not just occasional
mass shootings like the one at an Oregon college on Thursday, but a continuous
deluge of gun deaths, an average of 92 every day in America. Since 1970, more
Americans have died from guns than died in all U.S. wars going back to the
American Revolution.
When I reported a similar figure in the past, gun lobbyists insisted that it
couldn’t possibly be true. But the numbers are unarguable: fewer than 1.4
million war deaths since 1775, more than half in the Civil War, versus about
1.45 million gun deaths since 1970 (including suicides, murders and accidents).
If that doesn’t make you flinch, consider this: In America, more preschoolers
are shot dead each year (82 in 2013) than police officers are in the line of
duty (27 in 2013), according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention and the FBI.
More than 60 percent of gun deaths are suicides, and most of the rest are
homicides. Gun enthusiasts scoff at including suicides, saying that without guns
people would kill themselves by other means. In many cases, though, that’s not
true.
In Great Britain, people used to kill themselves by putting their heads in the
oven and asphyxiating themselves with coal gas. This accounted for almost half
of British suicides in the late 1950s, but Britain then began switching from
coal gas to natural gas, which is much less lethal. Sticking one’s head in the
oven was no longer a reliable way to kill oneself — and there was surprisingly
little substitution of other methods. Suicide rates dropped, and they stayed at
a lower level.
The British didn’t ban ovens, but they made them safer. We need to do the same
with guns.
When I tweeted about the need to address gun violence after college shooting in
the Roseburg, Ore., a man named Bob pushed back. “Check out car accident
deaths,” he tweeted sarcastically. “Guess we should ban cars.”
Actually, cars exemplify the public health approach we need to apply to guns. We
don’t ban cars, but we do require driver’s licenses, seatbelts, airbags, padded
dashboards, safety glass and collapsible steering columns. And we’ve reduced the
auto fatality rate by 95 percent.
One problem is that the gun lobby has largely blocked research on making guns
safer. Between 1973 and 2012, the National Institutes of Health awarded 89
grants for the study of rabies and 212 for cholera — and only three for firearms
injuries.
Daniel Webster, a public health expert at Johns Hopkins University, notes that
in 1999, the government listed the gun stores that had sold the most weapons
later linked to crimes. The gun store at the top of the list was so embarrassed
that it voluntarily took measures to reduce its use by criminals — and the rate
at which new guns from the store were diverted to crime dropped 77 percent.
But in 2003, Congress barred the government from publishing such information.
Why is Congress enabling pipelines of guns to criminals?
Public health experts cite many ways we could live more safely with guns, and
many of them have broad popular support.
A poll this year found that majorities even of gun-owners favor universal
background checks; tighter regulation of gun dealers; safe storage requirements
in homes; and a 10-year prohibition on possessing guns for anyone convicted of
domestic violence, assault or similar offenses.
We should also be investing in “smart gun” technology, such as weapons that fire
only with a PIN or fingerprint. We should adopt microstamping that allows a
bullet casing to be traced back to a particular gun. We can require liability
insurance for guns, as we do for cars.
It’s not clear that these steps would have prevented the Oregon shooting. But
Professor Webster argues that smarter gun policies could reduce murder rates by
up to 50 percent — and that’s thousands of lives a year. Right now, the
passivity of politicians is simply enabling shooters.
The gun lobby argues that the problem isn’t firearms; it’s crazy people. Yes,
America’s mental health system is a disgrace. But to me, it seems that we’re all
crazy if we as a country can’t take modest steps to reduce the carnage that
leaves America resembling a battlefield.
I invite you to sign up for my free, twice-weekly newsletter. When you do,
you’ll receive an email about my columns as they’re published and other
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 4, 2015, on page SR9 of the
New York edition with the headline: A New Way to Tackle Gun Deaths.
ROSEBURG, Ore. — Twenty-year-old Marc Beckwith was in Room 16 of
low-slung, mansard-roofed Snyder Hall, preparing for his computer lab. Cassandra
Welding, also 20, was slipping into the lab room just as a familiar figure was
slipping out.
It was Lawrence Levine, low-key, bearded, grizzled, on his way to teach a
writing class next door in Room 15. Ms. Welding had taken the class, and
treasured his patient encouragement. “I said, ‘Oh, hi, Larry,’ ” she recalled in
an interview.
The classes began at 10 a.m. By shortly after 10:30, Mr. Levine, 67, was dead of
a gunshot wound to the head.
Thursday, cool and cloudy, was the fourth day of classes at Umpqua Community
College here. Planted in a hairpin bend of southwest Oregon’s North Umpqua
River, the tree-studded campus seemed to embody what the college’s website
promised: “a peaceful, safe atmosphere” for aspiring scholars of any age to
pursue their dreams.
But it was not. Mr. Levine was among the first people whom 26-year-old
Christopher Harper-Mercer, a student in his class, shot to death. He would kill
eight more — a 20-year-old forward on the school basketball squad, a 34-year-old
outdoorsman out to improve his mind, a 59-year-old British expatriate attending
college with her daughter, and others — before police officers arrived and
wounded him in an exchange of gunfire. Nine others were wounded.
Mr. Harper-Mercer died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said on
Saturday.
“I heard one shot and said, ‘We need to get out.’ Then I heard a second and
third, and I ran,” said Sarah Cobb, a 17-year-old first-year student who was in
a writing classroom next to Professor Levine’s. “I was sprinting. I never ran so
fast in my life.
“I kept my head when I was running away from the scene, but when I was in
lockdown, I broke down,” she said.
The minutes that Mr. Harper-Mercer needed for his grisly work were an eternity
for the scores of students and instructors in Snyder Hall. The carnage was
mostly limited to Mr. Levine’s classroom, where almost all of the occupants
apparently were either killed or wounded. But in other classrooms, scenes of
terror, panic and heroism played out as students crawled into hiding, cared for
the wounded and, in one case, stood off the gunman as he sought to enter.
Roseburg now joins Charleston, S.C.; Newtown, Conn.; Blacksburg, Va.; Aurora,
Colo.; and many more on the roster of places where troubled men with firearms —
almost uniformly men — have uncorked their rage through mass killings.
Like some of them, Mr. Harper-Mercer was deeply involved with firearms and had a
small armory during his Snyder Hall rampage: body armor, five handguns, a
semiautomatic rifle and several magazines of ammunition. Like virtually all, he
smoldered with real or imagined grievances in a life that seemed off-kilter to
others, and pointless to himself, investigators say.
Described by neighbors as terse and morose, Mr. Harper-Mercer lived with his
mother, who divorced his father when their son was about 16. Mr. Harper-Mercer
had a brief and failed stint in Army basic training in 2008 and graduated from a
California high school for students with learning disabilities the next year. At
home, he inveighed against noisy neighbors, barking dogs, roach-infested rooms,
organized religion and, shortly before the killings, an existence devoid of
girlfriends and sex.
Roseburg held the prospect of a better life. Mr. Harper-Mercer and his mother,
Laurel Harper, moved there from a one-bedroom apartment in Torrance, Calif.,
after she found a nursing job.
“It was what she was looking for, peace and quiet, no city life. They were up
there to start over again,” Louie Flores, 32, a neighbor in Torrance, said in an
interview. “Chris, that was the first time I had actually seen him happy, to be
honest. I’d always seen him just straight-faced. He was excited to get out of
L.A. as well, to be out there. He said: ‘I like the woods. I like being in the
woods.’ ”
There were lots of woods: With about 22,000 people, Roseburg is the largest town
in a mountainous, rural region that once called itself the state’s timber
capital. But the timber industry has shrunk, unemployment is nearly 60 percent
above the national average, and much commerce barrels past downtown, on
Interstate 5, without slowing down. Both young and old are reinventing and
retraining themselves for jobs in more promising businesses.
Umpqua Community College is where many begin. The college’s 3,000-odd students
are a mix of ages and aspirations; its courses and ventures include truck
driving, nursing and an institute serving the area’s growing wine industry.
When Professor Levine convened his writing class in Snyder Hall on Thursday
morning, Mr. Harper-Mercer was apparently not in his seat. When he did appear
roughly a half-hour later, descriptions of what happened vary. Some say he fired
through a window, striking Mr. Levine in the head, even before barging through a
classroom door from a parking lot.
A graphic but unverified account by relatives of one injured student, Anastasia
Boylan, differed. Mr. Harper-Mercer stormed into the room, they said in an
interview with CNN, and said to Professor Levine, “I’ve been waiting to do this
for years.” Then he shot him.
The instructor in the computer lab next door, where Ms. Welding and Mr. Beckwith
were, had left on a brief errand. The students know only that they heard a loud
pop — like a book being dropped on the floor — and, perhaps 10 seconds later, a
scream and a man’s voice.
“I think it was someone saying, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Mr. Beckwith said.
A pause. A second shot, a third, a fourth and a cacophony of screams. In the
lab, Mr. Beckwith said, one older student, a woman with graying hair and a cane,
went to a door that, like others in the building, opened to the exterior, not a
hallway, and stepped out. “I’m going to go check on them,” he recalled her
saying.
Photo
A police investigator outside the gunman’s apartment building. Credit Steve
Dipaola/Reuters
Seconds later, she returned and collapsed into his arms. Her chest was bloody,
and part of her right arm had been ripped away. “Don’t go out there,” he said
she had told him. “It’s not safe.”
Mr. Beckwith said he did anyway, racing across the parking lot to a nearby house
to summon help. At 10:38, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department received a
call from the campus. Seconds later, a dispatcher asked for medical aid at
Snyder Hall.
“Somebody is outside one of the doors shooting through the door,” the dispatcher
said. “There is a female in the computer lab. We do have one female that has
been shot.”
About 15 students were hostage to Mr. Harper-Mercer, cowering on the classroom
floor. Witnesses told investigators that Mr. Harper-Mercer had demanded that the
students tell him their faith. Some of those witnesses have also said Mr.
Harper-Mercer seemed to target Christians.
But at least one of those killed, Quinn Cooper, 18, was not religious, said
Susan Ferris, the public affairs director for the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe
of Indians, where Mr. Cooper’s mother works.
“She said if you were to ask Quinn if he were Christian, he would have said, ‘I
am agnostic,’ ” Ms. Ferris said, quoting Mr. Cooper’s mother, Janet Cooper.
Cheyeanne Fitzgerald, a 16-year-old nursing student, told her mother that the
gunman gave an envelope to one student and ordered him into a corner, saying,
“You are going to be the lucky one.” Then he herded the remaining people into
the center of the room, where he started to shoot them.
The mother, Bonnie Schaan, said her daughter and Ms. Boylan played dead after
they were shot. Lying in a pool of blood, Ms. Fitzgerald used her cellphone to
send a message to her family via Facebook: the gunman, she wrote, “shot me in
the back.” Ms. Fitzgerald lost a kidney and is being treated at a local
hospital.
Patrol cars were racing to campus, asking where Snyder Hall was. “We are looking
up location on a map,” the dispatcher radioed, some two and one-half minutes
after the initial call for help.
More than a minute later: “There’s approximately 35 people in Snyder Hall right
now in the classrooms.”
In the adjacent rooms, panic reigned. In the computer lab, Ms. Welding said, the
woman who had been shot, gasping for air, was dragged inside and given CPR. As
others shouted “Close the door!” someone shut off the lights. With gunshots
popping from Room 15, the students barricaded themselves in a corner with desks
and backpacks.
Across the wall from Professor Levine’s classroom, Hannah Miles, 19, was in a
writing class when the shots erupted. Students suggested that the instructor
open a sliding door connecting the two classes to see what was happening. “I’m
not going to open that door,” Ms. Miles quoted the teacher as saying, but she
did knock and ask whether all was well.
The response was a staccato series of shots. “Everybody out,” someone yelled,
and the classroom emptied chaotically into the outdoors, students running to
other buildings to hide.
Thirty-year-old Chris Mintz, an Army veteran who was studying fitness training
at Umpqua, saw the gunman. According to family and friends, he blocked a
classroom door as Mr. Harper-Mercer tried to enter.
The gunman shot him repeatedly through the doorway, then pushed through. Mr.
Mintz, on the floor, told his attacker that it was his son’s sixth birthday, and
was shot again before the gunman moved on. Mr. Mintz is expected to recover from
his wounds.
Barely six minutes after a police dispatcher raised the first alarm, an officer
who had arrived on campus radioed a message: “We’re exchanging shots with him.
He’s in a classroom on the southeast side of Snyder Hall.”
Two minutes later, another message crackled over the radio: “Code Four,” the
officer said, signaling that no more help was needed. “The suspect is down.”
And then, two minutes after that: “We’ve got multiple gunshot wounds. We’re
going to need multiple ambulances on scene.”
Several miles to the south, workers at Bay Cities Ambulance were monitoring the
exchange. The company sent all four of its available ambulances racing to the
campus. They would all be needed.
Correction: October 3, 2015
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a contributing
reporter. He is Dave Philipps, not Dave Phillips.
Claire Cain Miller reported from Roseburg, Julie Turkewitz from Denver, and
Michael Wines from New York. Reporting was contributed by Laura M. Holson from
Roseburg; Ian Lovett from Torrance, Calif.; Jess Bidgood from Boston; and Dave
Philipps and Timothy Williams from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on October 4, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: Chaos, Horror and Heroism in Snyder Hall.
Austin, Tex. — I’M not sure if this meets the exact definition of
irony, but it definitely meets the exact definition of insanity:
Across the country, there’s so much concern for college students’ emotional
safety that some schools add “trigger warnings” to novels and other texts. But
in Texas, there’s so little concern for college students’ physical safety that
concealed firearms will be permitted in classrooms at public universities like
the state flagship here.
This wasn’t the doing or desire of administrators and faculty at the University
of Texas — most of whom, it seems, are horrified — but of conservative Texas
lawmakers on a tireless mission to loosen gun restrictions whenever, however and
wherever they can.
To be or not to be armed in Shakespeare class? Your choice!
Guns in dorms? Just the ticket for a good night’s sleep!
It gets better, by which I mean more surreal: The law, which was passed four
months ago, will take effect on Aug. 1, 2016. That’s 50 years to the day since
one of the first and most infamous mass shootings at an American school, the
beginning of a bloody tape loop. It happened right here, at the University of
Texas at Austin, where an engineering student climbed to the top of the iconic
tower in the center of campus and, for an agonizing hour and a half, sprayed the
surrounding area with bullets, killing 14 people and injuring more than 30.
Scores of students and faculty members gathered in the shadow of that tower
around midday Thursday to protest the new law. Immediately afterward, when they
returned to their computers or checked their smartphones, they learned of the
latest massacre, on an Oregon campus, where a gunman killed nine people.
This is madness. When it comes to guns, we have lost our bearings in this
country, allowing misguided chest-thumping about a constitutional amendment
penned in an entirely different epoch, under entirely different circumstances,
to trump all prudence and decency.
President Obama had it right when he said on Thursday that Americans had “become
numb to this,” as evidenced by our political paralysis — or, in the case of
Texas, our sprint in the wrong direction. He noted that there was now “a gun for
roughly every man, woman and child in America.”
“So how can you, with a straight face, make the argument that more guns will
make us safer?” he added.
They made that argument here in Texas en route to the passage of “campus carry,”
the shorthand for the new law. Campus carry. Take a moment with that phrase. Get
beyond its amiable alliteration. It’s an endorsement of guns in a haven for
scholarship and theater of ideas where there’s an especially powerful case
against them.
That case was pressed by the chancellor for the University of Texas system,
William McRaven, who hardly winces at the mention of firearms. He was a member
of the Navy SEALs who rose to the ranks of admiral and helped to plot the raid
that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.
Before campus carry became law, he told Evan Smith of The Texas Tribune: “I’m an
educator now, and my first priority is to the students and the faculty and the
administrators and the clinicians.”
“I absolutely understand the Second Amendment,” he added. “I have spent my life
fighting for the Second Amendment. You know, you have to ask yourself why did
the founding fathers put freedom of speech as the First Amendment? They may have
done that because freedom of speech is incredibly important, and if you have
guns on campus, I question whether or not that will somehow inhibit our freedom
of speech.”
Pressed to elaborate, McRaven continued: “If you’re in a heated debate with
somebody in the middle of a classroom and you don’t know whether or not that
individual is carrying, how does that inhibit the interaction between students
and faculty?”
That concern was raised time and again by faculty members and students with whom
I spoke over recent days. Joan Neuberger, a history professor and one of the
founders of a new advocacy group called Gun Free UT, told me: “If I know that
there’s a possibility that someone will have gun in his pocket, I can’t in good
conscience get students to debate the way they do now.”
It can be argued that campus carry isn’t that extreme a change. It permits guns
only for people with concealed-handgun permits, for which civilians must be 21
or older and have completed some training. Few undergraduates meet those
criteria.
THOSE people were already allowed to have guns on university grounds. They just
couldn’t bring them into classrooms, dorms and other inside spaces, some of
which may remain off limits. The new law says that the university president can
move to exempt certain areas, but university administrators fear that every such
move will be legally challenged and prompt political blowback.
What’s more, exempt areas must be prominently identified as such, so students
moving around campus would constantly be reminded that while guns might not be
allowed over here, they’re perfectly O.K. over there.
What an odd consciousness to instill in students. What a jolting intrusion into
the business of learning.
“A big majority of campus was against this,” Xavier Rotnofsky, the student body
president at U.T. Austin, told me, adding that he and others found it absurd and
offensive that lawmakers acted knowingly “without the consent of the
stakeholders.”
Possibly that just encouraged the lawmakers. “Universities are uniquely liberal
institutions and they’re targets for conservatives,” Neuberger noted, adding
that campus carry may well have been their way of “attacking the bedrock of
liberal values that the university represents.”
Private colleges in Texas can opt out of campus carry. Public colleges can’t.
Will that make them less attractive to the taxpayers who have supported and need
them? Andrea Gore, the chairwoman of the U.T. Austin Faculty Council, told me
that she’s worried that “some parents won’t consider the University of Texas
because of this.”
Maybe just a few more guns find their way onto campus. Isn’t that a few guns too
many, especially in an environment where excessive drinking occurs, among people
at an age when anxiety and depression can be acute?
Do we really want to do anything at all to unsettle young men and women in the
phase of life when they’re trying to polish the confidence and optimism that
will help them tackle the world?
And what justifies a message and a climate of greater permissiveness about guns
in a country that has witnessed so much shooting and so many funerals?
The students at Texas’s public universities are getting an education all right —
into how perverse and nonsensical government can be.
I invite you to follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/frankbruni
and join me on Facebook.
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for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 4, 2015, on page SR3 of the
New York edition with the headline: Guns, Campuses and Madness.
SEATTLE — Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon signed a bill in May that
requires greater background checks for gun transfers.
It was the state’s first major gun-control law in over a decade, and for Ms.
Brown, Oregon’s former secretary of state, who took office in February during a
political scandal, it was also a firm statement of the new direction she wanted
the state to take.
The Douglas County sheriff, John Hanlin, now leading the team investigating the
shootings on Thursday at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, was one of the
bill’s main opponents.
“This law is not going to protect citizens of Oregon in that it is going to keep
guns out of the hands of criminals,” Sheriff Hamlin told the State Legislature
in testifying against the bill. And, he added, poor counties like his would not
have the means to enforce it.
“Our budget is continuously shrinking to the point that there are times when we
have a difficult time simply responding to domestic disturbances, vehicle
crashes, the ordinary calls for service that happen every day,” he said in his
videotaped testimony. “To expect local law enforcement to run down and do an
investigation into whether or not an individual, a private individual, has
conducted a background check is nearly impossible.”
The divide between the governor and the sheriff shows how questions of gun
rights and restrictions reflect not just divisions between conservatives and
liberals, or between high-crime and low-crime areas, but also between rich
communities and poor ones.
In Oregon, the divide between urban places, which are booming, especially the
state’s largest city, Portland, and rural ones, which are largely struggling,
has often shaped the debate over guns and other social issues. And the clash has
intensified as inequality has grown, with cities becoming hubs of technology, as
well as population growth, giving them increased clout in the Legislature, while
places like Douglas County have been starved for resources and population as old
extraction industries like timber have stumbled.
“There is absolutely no question that there is a rural-urban divide in Oregon,”
Ms. Brown, a Democrat from Portland, said in an interview on Friday. “I think
that is part of a conversation about how we create safer communities in the
future.”
Part of the dynamic of the gun law question in Oregon — and the gun debate
nationally — has been the role of national groups like Everytown for Gun Safety,
the organization funded by Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor.
The group, which announced a $50 million campaign last year to support
gun-control candidates and legislation, spent more than $110,000 in Oregon last
year, with a focus on shifting a few important legislative seats that would lead
to majority support for the background check law that Ms. Brown signed.
It went into effect in August.
Even with the new law, the main contours of who can and cannot buy a guy in
Oregon mirror those of most other states in the nation, where the Supreme Court
has ruled that the Second Amendment protects individuals’ right to bear arms. No
license is required simply to purchase a handgun or a long gun, though when
going to their local gun shops to buy firearms people must pass background
checks conducted by the State Police that bar people who have felony
convictions, have been involuntarily committed to a mental health institution,
or fall into certain other prohibited categories.
When it comes to a license to carry a concealed handgun, Oregon is what is
considered a “shall issue” state, which means that for the most part, local
authorities have little discretion to deny someone such a permit.
Sheriffs do have the right under the law to deny someone a permit if there are
“reasonable grounds” to believe the person is a danger to himself or others as a
result of his mental state or “past pattern of behavior involving unlawful
violence or threats of unlawful violence.”
The gunman in Roseburg, identified as Christopher Harper-Mercer, 26, did not
appear to have warranted a denial. Federal officials said all 13 of his guns,
including six found at the scene, were legally obtained by him and his
relatives.
Continue reading the main story
Mass Shootings in the U.S.
This partial list dates to 2007, the year of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S.
history.
States in recent years have gone both ways, with the number of legislatures
toughening gun laws about equal to the number weakening them, according to the
Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a group based in San Francisco, in an
analysis last year. But that group and others like the Brady Campaign to Prevent
Gun Violence also said that some new control measures, notably Oregon’s this
year, are tougher and more far-reaching than the laws making gun ownership
easier.
In Oregon, the background check measure was led mostly by Democrats from
Portland, who largely control the Legislature, and some rural lawmakers cited a
cultural divide in voting no. In many parts of the state, Portland is seen as
alien, a place that does not understand the real Oregon.
At a news conference on Friday, for example, Sheriff Hanlin was asked whether it
was normal for one person to own so many guns.
“In Oregon?” he said. “This is a hunting state. Firearms are popular in most
households.”
Sheriff Hanlin has been an especially vocal critic of efforts to toughen gun
laws. After the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Mr. Hanlin posted a
letter to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on his department’s Facebook page,
arguing that efforts to restrict gun ownership “would be an indisputable insult
to the American people.”
Sheriff Hanlin also shared a link on his personal Facebook page to a YouTube
video that suggested that the school shootings in Newtown, Conn., in 2012 — and
the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — might have been staged by the federal government
to provide a pretext for “disarming the public” through gun-control legislation.
That post was removed Friday after it attracted criticism.
But in the region where he works, gun rights are often fiercely defended.
Private gun ownership for protection, and in some cases armed citizen patrols in
depressed areas of Oregon where cuts in law enforcement budgets have been
particularly severe, have added another wrinkle to the debate.
A few years ago, after burglaries rose about 70 percent as law enforcement
budgets were battered in Josephine County, another timber-economy community just
south of Roseburg, patrol groups took up where the police had left off. Their
guns, the patrollers said, were helping keep the community safe.
Governor Brown, however, said gun attacks were not limited to any demographic or
ZIP code.
“They have occurred in rural Oregon and urban Oregon, and we need to figure out
a way,” Ms. Brown said. As for answers, she added, the details and ideas will
come later. For now, she said, residents in Roseburg and Oregonians generally
are still in grief and shock.
But safety is paramount and should cut through the usual divides, Ms. Brown
said. Oregon and other states, she said, need to figure out “how we can come
together around this tragedy and future tragedies and figure out a way to build
healthier communities where our children, whether they’re in community college
or in kindergarten, feel safe going to school — and where conflict is resolved
through much more peaceful means.”
Michael Luo and Robert Mackey contributed reporting from New
York.
A version of this article appears in print on October 3, 2015, on page A16 of
the New York edition with the headline: Debate on Guns Defies Political Labels.
The Republican presidential candidates were quick to offer
sympathy but little else to the nation, to the grieving families and to the
terrified town where the latest in American gun carnage took 10 lives on
Thursday at an Oregon community college.
“We have to really get to the bottom of it,” Donald Trump, usually the most
voluble candidate in offering quick-fix certainty about national challenges,
told The Washington Post. “It’s so hard to even talk about these things.”
Now, as the presidential campaigns intensify, is precisely the time that he and
the other candidates must talk about these things — about the horrendous toll
the mass shootings have inflicted on the nation, with no end in sight. Like
other Republican politicians, and many Democrats, too, Mr. Trump simplistically
narrowed the topic of the gun massacre to “another mental health problem.”
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editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.
This has become the standard political line, particularly among Republicans, for
ducking the crucial fact that easy access to powerful arsenals — the Oregon
murderer reportedly had 13 firearms, six of which he brought with him — is the
great modern enabler for individuals, mentally ill or not, to massacre the
innocent in shooting sprees.
The contrast could not be greater between the bromide-driven slate of Republican
candidates promising thoughts and prayers after “this senseless tragedy” and
President Obama in his understandable fury and near despair over the political
cowering to the gun industry and its lobbyists. Mass shootings have become an
unsurprising part of American life, with lame public rituals in which
politicians express grief and then retreat quickly into denial about this
scourge.
The gun lobby has such a grip on Congress that it has successfully squelched
most federal research on the problem. It wasn’t until last year that the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, prompted by the White House, issued a report confirming
that mass shootings have been rising significantly in recent years.
In a 13-year study, analysts found that while the average number of annual
shooting sprees with multiple casualties was 6.4 a year from 2000 to 2006, that
number jumped to 16.4 a year from 2007 to 2013. The study found that many of the
gunmen had studied previous high-profile shootings and were attracted to the
attention that mass killers received when they staged lethal attacks.
Modern high-powered weapons, adapted from war and unscrupulously marketed on the
home front, have unfortunately provided the means for a shooter to act out his
anger and despair in a matter of minutes. The state-sponsored citizens report on
the gun massacre of 20 schoolchildren and six workers in Newtown, Conn., in 2012
concluded there is “no legitimate place in the civilian population” for
fast-firing rifles and large-capacity magazines that were invented for the
military but have flooded the American marketplace.
These are the problems that political leaders should be discussing after the
latest gun tragedy. Democratic presidential candidates have not ducked the
issue. Hillary Rodham Clinton has repeatedly called for greater gun safety,
telling voters, “We have to take on the gun lobby.” Bernie Sanders, who as a
senator from Vermont has been criticized for not being strong enough on the
issue, firmly endorsed President Obama’s gun control agenda after the Oregon
massacre. He said he is tired of sending condolences to grieving families after
these brutal murders.
Republican candidates should be no less tired of sending condolences. In the
presidential debates, they should not be allowed to retreat behind the mental
health issue and avoid confronting the grim reality. They should explain what
actions they will take, if elected, to avoid being the nation’s serial
griever-in-chief.
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A version of this editorial appears in print on October 3, 2015, on page A22 of
the New York edition with the headline: Political Rituals After Mass Shootings.
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s rage about gun massacres, building
for years, spilled out Thursday night as he acknowledged his own powerlessness
to prevent another tragedy and pleaded with voters to force change themselves.
“So tonight, as those of us who are lucky enough to hug our kids a little closer
are thinking about the families who aren’t so fortunate,” the president said in
the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, named for a man severely wounded by a
would-be assassin’s bullet, “I’d ask the American people to think about how they
can get our government to change these laws, and to save these lives and let
these people grow up.”
Mr. Obama admitted that he was unable to do anything to prevent such tragedies
by himself. And he did little to try to hide the anger and frustration that have
deepened as he returns again and again to the White House lectern in the wake of
a deadly mass shooting.
Mr. Obama took a veiled swipe at the National Rifle Association, which has
successfully fought most limits on gun use and manufacture and has pushed
through legislation in many states making gun ownership far easier. “And I would
particularly ask America’s gun owners who are using those guns properly, safely,
to hunt for sport, for protecting their families, to think about whether your
views are being properly represented by the organization that suggests it is
speaking for you,” he said.
Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman for the N.R.A., declined to respond to Mr.
Obama, saying that it was the organization’s policy “not to comment until all
the facts are known.” Wayne LaPierre, the organization’s executive vice
president, declared after the school shootings in Newtown, Conn., “The only
thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
On Thursday night, Mr. Obama said that given the frequency of mass shootings,
people had “become numb to this.”
“And what’s become routine, of course, is the response of those who oppose any
kind of common-sense gun legislation,” Mr. Obama said. “Right now, I can imagine
the press releases being cranked out. ‘We need more guns,’ they’ll argue. ‘Fewer
gun-safety laws.’ ”
“Does anybody really believe that?” he asked, his voice rising.
Mr. Obama sought to answer that question years ago. After the massacre in 2012
of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, he
promised to use all the powers of his office to push for legislative changes
that polls suggest were widely supported.
“Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage,
that the politics are too hard?” Mr. Obama asked then.
Less than a month later, Mr. Obama unveiled a proposal to overhaul the nation’s
gun laws that would have included universal background checks and a spate of
other measures he deemed “concrete steps” aimed at preventing more mass
shootings.
“This is how we will be judged,” he said in January 2013.
The judgment came just a few months later, as lawmakers from both parties
forcefully rejected the centerpiece of the president’s gun control agenda. At
the time, and also visibly upset, Mr. Obama stood in the Rose Garden to denounce
the opponents of new gun measures even as he acknowledged the futility of his
efforts.
He called it a “shameful day” in Washington and promised that eventually, “I
believe we’re going to be able to get this done.” In a Twitter message on
Thursday, Dan Pfeiffer, who was a senior adviser to Mr. Obama until this year,
remembered that afternoon as “the most frustrated I ever saw President Obama in
8 years.”
With each massacre since, Mr. Obama has been forced to help the country grieve,
as presidents are called upon to do in national tragedies. Thirteen dead at the
Washington Navy Yard; three dead at Fort Hood in Killeen, Tex.; nine dead in a
church in Charleston, S.C.
And with each massacre, his sense of powerless anger and frustration has built.
But what was different this time was that the president did not announce any new
initiative or effort to fix the problem. Instead, he pointed out that there is
“a gun for roughly every man, woman and child in America. So how can you with a
straight face make the argument that more guns will make us safer?”
States and countries that have gun limits have far fewer gun deaths than those
that do not, he said. “So we know there are ways to prevent it,” he said.
He pointed out that the government responds to mine disasters by insisting on
safer mines, to weather disasters by improving community safety, and to highway
deaths by fixing roads and insisting that drivers wear seatbelts.
But guns are seen as so different that Congress has forbidden the federal
government even to collect certain statistics, he said. He rejected the notion
that the Constitution forbids even modest regulation of deadly weapons.
He also asked news organizations to tally the number of Americans killed by
terrorist attacks over the last 10 years and compare that with the number killed
by domestic gun violence. And he implicitly compared the trillions of dollars
spent and multiple agencies devoted to preventing the relatively few terrorism
deaths with the minimal effort and money spent to prevent the far greater number
of gun deaths.
And then he challenged voters to make gun safety a priority.
“If you think this is a problem, then you should expect your elected officials
to reflect your views,” he said.
Mr. Obama has long been seen as fairly unemotional, even distant. His speeches
since being elected in 2008 have sometimes seemed like lectures from the
constitutional law professor he once was. But he is also a father, one who
insists on eating dinner with his daughters.
Shootings, particularly at schools, have seemingly brought together his roles as
president and father in ways nothing else has. And that combination brings forth
the kind of raw emotion he almost never betrays.
His eulogy in June for the victims of the massacre in Charleston, for instance,
was widely considered one of his most impassioned, and included singing the
opening refrain of “Amazing Grace.”
Thursday night, he had little of the soaring language and certainly none of the
hope he expressed in Charleston. But he promised to continue hammering away at
this issue for the rest of his presidency.
“Each time this happens, I’m going to bring this up,” he said. “Each time this
happens, I’m going to say that we can actually do something about it.”
A version of this article appears in print on October 2, 2015, on
page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Save These Lives and Let
These People Grow Up’.
ROSEBURG, Ore. — The gunman who killed nine people on a college
campus set out on his rampage armed with six guns, a flak jacket and enough
ammunition to do far more damage — an angry, isolated young man whose rage was
fueled by animus toward religion and resentment at how his life was unfolding,
law enforcement officials said Friday.
At the scene of the carnage, on the campus of Umpqua Community College,
investigators found a typed statement several pages long, written by the gunman,
who died there in a shootout with the police, describing his life as a deck of
cards stacked against him. He was a student at the college and was enrolled in
the writing class he targeted, local authorities said on Friday.
“He didn’t have a girlfriend, and he was upset about that,” said a senior law
enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not
authorized to discuss the matter publicly. “He comes across thinking of himself
as a loser. He did not like his lot in life, and it seemed like nothing was
going right for him.”
The gunman, who has been identified as Christopher Harper-Mercer, 26, “seems to
be someone who was very anti-organized religion,” the official said, adding, “it
does not appear like he was part of some larger group.” Investigators are poring
through the trail of anger Mr. Mercer left online, including what one official
described as “hateful writings,” and through a computer of his that was
recovered.
The gunman brought five handguns and a rifle to the college on Thursday morning,
the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department said, though it was not clear how many
of those he fired. He also had two pistols, four rifles and a shotgun in his
apartment. In all, he had owned 14 firearms, said Celinez Nunez, an agent with
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
“All 14 have been traced to a federal firearms dealer,” some bought by the
gunman and others by members of his family, said Ms. Nunez, the assistant
special agent in charge of the Seattle field office. “They were all purchased
legally,” she said.
“We also were able to recover a flak jacket lying next to the rifle at the
school,” Ms. Nunez said. “The jacket had steel plates, along with five
magazines. An additional amount of ammunition was also recovered at the
apartment.”
When the police reached Mr. Harper-Mercer, they shot and wounded him, a law
enforcement official said. He was able to run away and then shot himself. He
died in an ambulance en route to the hospital; the official said it was unclear
whether the self-inflicted wound was the fatal one.
A day after Umpqua joined the sad roster of schools struck by similar tragedies,
family members of some survivors said their relatives had told them that the
gunman had specifically targeted Christians. Law enforcement officials would not
confirm or deny that.
“ ‘Are you a Christian?’ he would ask them,” Stacy Boylan, father of Anastasia
Boylan, 18, told CNN. “‘And if you’re a Christian, stand up.’ And they would
stand up and he said, ‘Good, because you’re a Christian, you’re going to see God
in just about one second.’ And then he shot and killed them, and then he kept
going down the line doing this to people.”
Mr. Boylan said his daughter was shot in the spine but survived.
His was one of several accounts that emerged Friday of what happened when the
gunman stormed an expository writing class in Snyder Hall.
J. J. Vicari, 19, was in another classroom in the same building when the gunfire
began shortly after 10:30 a.m. He said another student, a woman, ran out of the
room to investigate, then staggered back in, bleeding. She told the others to
lock the door, and then slumped to the ground.
“We all jumped under the desk,” Mr. Vicari said in an interview at his home in
Sutherlin, 15 miles north of Roseburg. “I heard every shot.”
Over the next 15 minutes, hunched on the floor, he heard 30 to 40 gunshots. A
woman’s scream. He said he never saw or heard the gunman. He texted his
girlfriend, “I want to tell you I love you,” and “I’m scared.” Two students
attended to their wounded classmate as her breathing slowed.
Chris Mintz, 30, was shot multiple times and his legs were broken, but he is
expected to live, according to family members interviewed by the television
station WGHP in North Carolina, where he grew up.
Mr. Mintz “tries to block the door to keep the gunman from coming, gets shot
three times, hits the floor, looks up at the gunman and says ‘It’s my son’s
birthday today,’ gets shot two more times,” Wanda Mintz, his aunt, told WGHP.
A cousin, Ariana Earnhardt, said, “His vital signs are O.K., I mean, he’s going
to have to learn to walk again, but he walked away with his life, and that’s
more than so many other people did.”
On a recording of emergency workers’ radio traffic, six minutes after the
initial call of a shooting, a police officer can be heard saying: “We’re
exchanging shots with him. He’s in a classroom on the southeast side of Snyder
Hall.”
Just over two minutes later, an officer shouted, “The suspect is down.”
The shooting renewed the heated debate over gun control that has followed mass
shootings in so many parts of the country, with President Obama speaking
emotionally on Thursday, and again on Friday, calling on Congress to take
measures to curb gun violence. But Oregon’s top elected officials, Democrats in
a state where guns and hunting are popular, took a much more cautious tone on
Friday.
Speaking at a news conference here, Gov. Kate Brown and Senators Ron Wyden and
Jeff Merkley all said some steps should be taken, but that now was not the time
to decide what those should be, or even to discuss them. And all avoided using
the phrase “gun control.”
Mr. Merkley, who was born in Douglas County and lived here for the first several
years of his life, said one of the people killed at the college was a cousin.
“This horrific, this senseless act, has broken hearts, every heart here,” he
said.
Through the day Friday, more than 100 law enforcement officers continued to comb
through the crime scene and interview witnesses and people who knew the gunman.
Sheriff John Hanlin of Douglas County refused to say the gunman’s name and vowed
that even as it was released by other agencies, it would not be uttered by his
department. Echoing a position taken by officials in some other places rocked by
mass shootings, he said he would not give the gunman the fame he craved, and
asked journalists to follow his lead, rekindling an old debate about the role of
the news media.
Dirk VanderHart reported from Roseburg, and Richard Pérez-Peña
and Michael S. Schmidt reported from New York. Jack Healy, Claire Cain Miller
and Laura Holson contributed reporting from Roseburg, and Julie Turkewitz from
Denver. Susan Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed research from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on October 3, 2015, on page A15 of
the New York edition with the headline: In Note Left Behind, Gunman ‘Did Not
Like His Lot in Life,’ Officials Say.
TORRANCE, Calif. — Chris Harper Mercer, the man identified as the
gunman in the deadly rampage at Umpqua Community College in Oregon on Thursday,
was a withdrawn young man who neighbors said wore the same outfit every day —
combat boots, green Army pants and a white T-shirt — and was close to his
mother, who fiercely protected him.
In both Winchester, Ore., and Torrance, Calif., where Mr. Mercer, 26, lived with
his mother, Laurel Harper, neighbors remember a reclusive and seemingly fragile
young man with a shaved head and dark glasses who appeared to recoil from social
interaction.
“He always seemed anxious,” said Rosario Lucumi, 51, who rode the same bus in
Torrance as Mr. Mercer when she went to work. She said she believed he took it
to El Camino College. “He always had earphones in, listening to music,” she
said.
Investigators are now seeking to trace the path that led that reclusive young
man to wage a rampage at the Roseburg, Ore., college that left nine people dead.
The authorities said Mr. Mercer, who died during the attack, had acquired 14
weapons, six of which they recovered at the school.
They are studying writings he left behind in which he described himself as angry
and depressed. They say he also expressed an animus against organized religion.
Mr. Mercer appeared to have sought community on the Internet, leaving hints
behind of his passions, his loneliness, his likes and dislikes. A picture of him
holding a rifle appeared on a MySpace page with a post expressing a deep
interest in the Irish Republican Army. It included footage from the conflict in
Northern Ireland set to “The Men Behind the Wire,” an Irish republican song, and
several pictures of gunmen in black balaclavas.
A dating profile published more than three months ago with his email address on
the website Spiritual Passions., and featuring photos of Mr. Mercer, appeared to
broaden the portrait. “Looking for someone who shares my beliefs, and is similar
to me,” it said. It said he enjoyed horror movies and under hobbies, it listed
“killing zombies” along with the “Internet” and other pursuits.
The profile described Mercer was “Not Religious, Not Religious, but Spiritual”
and it said he belonged to a group called “Doesn’t Like Organized Religion.”
On a file-sharing forum where illicit content is often posted, blog posts linked
to Mr. Mercer’s email address expressed sympathy for Vester Lee Flanagan II, who
killed two former co-workers during a live newscast in Roanoke, Va., in August.
“People like him have nothing left to live for, and the only thing left to do is
lash out at a society that has abandoned them,” the user wrote just days after
the Roanoke shooting. “His family described him as alone, no partner/lover. A
victim not only of his own perception but also of our social media soaked
environment.”
In a post published in September, after the shooting death of Darren Goforth, a
sheriff’s deputy killed as he filled his squad card at suburban Houston gas
station, the user with Mr. Mercer’s email address said it was the inevitable
result of the Black Lives Matter movement. “In case anyone’s wondering, I’m not
on the side of the suspect, I’m on the side of the officer, and generally don’t
agree with the black lives matter protests,” he said.
The user, who posted under the user name lithium_love, shared an enormous amount
of pornography, as well as movies like “Illuminati Secrets” and “U.F.O. Secrets
of the Third Reich.”
He shared with forum posters that he had never had a girlfriend. On Sep. 30,
responding to a comment that he “must be saving himself for someone special,” he
said, “Involuntarily so.”
Many of the posts have since been taken down.
In the offline world, Mr. Mercer was listed as a graduate of the Switzer
Learning Center in Torrance, a school for special education students. He was
also in the army for one month in 2008, but was discharged before he finished
basic training, according to Pentagon records.
His parents have been divorced for about a decade. Former neighbors in Torrance
said Mr. Mercer’s mother had sought to protect him from all manner of
neighborhood annoyances, from loud children and barking dogs to household pests.
Once, neighbors said, she went door-to-door with a petition to get the landlord
to exterminate cockroaches in her apartment, saying they bothered her son.
“She said, ‘My son is dealing with some mental issues, and the roaches are
really irritating him,’ ” Julia Winstead, 55, said. “She said they were going to
go stay in a motel. Until that time, I didn’t know she had a son.”
Ms. Lucumi estimated that Mr. Mercer and his mother, who shared a small
one-bedroom apartment in Torrance, lived here for less than a year. “They were
always together,” she said. .
Bryan Clay, 18, said he had once asked Mr. Mercer why he wore “a military
get-up” every day. “He kind of just didn’t want of talk about it” and changed
the subject, Mr. Clay said.
“He didn’t say anything about himself,” he added.
Derrick McClendon, 42, another former neighbor, said that Mr. Mercer had been so
timid and ill at ease that on occasion he would ask him if something was wrong.
“I would say, ‘Hey, man, you all right?’ ” Mr. McClendon said. “He would say
‘hi,’ but that’s it. He was really shy.”
Rosario Espinoza, 33, was once a neighbor of Mr. Mercer’s and moved into the
apartment that the mother and son shared when the two moved from Torrance a
couple of years ago. She said that the two had “kept to themselves,” but that
from time to time Mr. Mercer’s mother would complain that Ms. Espinoza’s young
children were playing too loudly and bothering her son.
“They’re normal children that play, but she would get really upset,” Ms.
Espinoza said. “It was during the daytime. But I guess the noise would really
upset him, the son.”
Other neighbors said she would confront them about their barking dogs when they
returned from work. “She would wait till they got home and knock on their door,”
Kim Hermenegildo, 48, said.
Ms. Espinoza said that she had heard Mr. Mercer’s mother got a job in Oregon,
prompting the family’s move north.
In Winchester, Ore., Mr. Mercer and his mother shared an apartment in a
dun-colored building that sat roped off behind police tape on Thursday evening,
guarded by sheriff’s deputies who shooed away reporters.
Bronte Hart, a neighbor who said she lived in an apartment below Mr. Mercer’s,
described a more assertive young man than his former neighbors in California
did. Far from avoiding social interaction, she said, he frequently shouted at
her for smoking on her balcony.
“He yelled at us, me and my husband,” said Ms. Hart, who lives in the building
with her husband and father. “He was not a friendly type of guy. He did not want
anything to do with anyone.”
Ian Lovett reported from Torrance, Calif., and Liam Stack from New York. Dirk
VanderHart contributed reporting from Winchester, Ore., and Ken Schwencke from
New York.
ROSEBURG, Ore. — A 26-year-old man opened fire on a community
college campus here in a rampage that left 10 people dead and seven wounded and
turned this rural stretch of southern Oregon into the latest American locale
ravaged by a mass shooting.
Students described scenes of carnage concentrated in a public speaking class
that was underway in a college humanities building, and people fleeing in panic
from classrooms as they heard shots nearby.
The college, Umpqua Community College, went into lockdown, and the gunman died
in an exchange of gunfire with police officers who responded, law enforcement
officials said.
With anxious parents waiting at a fairground near the campus and the police
going from classroom to classroom, the authorities’ reports of the death toll
varied throughout the day. At a 5 p.m. news conference, John Hanlin, the sheriff
of Douglas County, said that he believed there were 10 dead, calling the toll
the “best, most accurate information we have at this time.” He declined to say
whether the gunman was included in the death toll.
Law enforcement officials identified the gunman Thursday night as Chris Harper
Mercer, and said he had three weapons, at least one of them a long gun and the
other ones handguns. It was not clear whether he fired them all. The officials
said the man lived in the Roseburg area.
They said one witness had told them that Mr. Mercer had asked about people’s
religions before he began firing. “He appears to be an angry young man who was
very filled with hate,” one law enforcement official said. Investigators are
poring over what one official described as “hateful” writings by Mr. Mercer. The
F.B.I. has dispatched dozens of agents to assist in the investigation.
Sheriff Hanlin said at a news conference that he would not speak the gunman’s
name.
“Let me be very clear, I will not name the shooter,” he said. “I will not give
him the credit he probably sought prior to this horrific and cowardly act.”
He also encouraged reporters “not to glorify and create sensationalism for him.
He in no way deserves it.”
The massacre added the community college to a string of schools that have been
left grieving after mass shootings, a list that runs from Columbine High School
in 1999 to Virginia Tech in 2007 to Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown,
Conn., where 20 children were killed in 2012.
President Obama, in an impassioned appearance at the White House, said that
grief was not enough, and he implored Americans, “whether they are Democrats or
Republicans or independents,” to consider their representatives’ stance on gun
control when they voted and to decide “whether this cause of continuing death
for innocent people should be a relevant factor.”
State and local officials all expressed shock. Gov. Kate Brown said at a news
conference that she felt “profound dismay and heartbreak.”
The first reports of shots came at 10:38 a.m. on what was the fourth day of the
new session. Students said they took place in Classroom 15 in a building called
Snyder that houses many English and writing classes.
Cassandra Welding, a 20-year-old junior, was in Classroom 16, next to the
shooting, and heard several loud bursts, like balloons popping. There were about
20 people in the classroom. A middle-aged woman behind her rose to shut the
classroom door and was struck in the stomach by several bullets.
“He was just out there, hanging outside the door,” Ms. Welding said of the
gunman, “and she slumped over and I knew something wasn’t right. And they’re
like, ‘She got shot, she got shot.’ And everyone is panicking.”
A friend of the injured woman dragged her into the room and began delivering
CPR, Ms. Welding said. Someone clicked the door shut and the students huddled in
the corner, blocking themselves with desks and backpacks. “I heard more
shooting,” Ms. Welding said. “It was horrific. My whole body was shaking. A
chill was going down my spine. We called 911.”
She added, “I was on the phone with my mom pretty much the entire time. I knew
this could have been the last time I talked to her.”
Brady Winder, 23, who moved to Roseburg only three weeks ago, was in a writing
class.
“We heard one shot,” Mr. Winder said. “It sounded like someone dropped something
heavy on the floor, and everybody kind of startled. There’s a door connecting
our classroom to that classroom, and my teacher was going to knock on the door,
but she called out, ‘Is everybody O.K.?’ And then we heard a bunch more shots.
We all froze for about half a second. Everybody’s head turned and looked at each
other, trying to just grasp what was happening, and someone said, ‘Those are
gunshots.’ We heard people screaming next door. And then everybody took off.
People were hopping over desks, knocking things over.”
Kortney Moore, 18, from Rogue River, told the Roseburg newspaper, The
News-Review, that the gunman had asked people to stand up and state their
religion and then started firing. She said she saw her teacher shot in the head,
adding that she herself was on the floor with people who had been shot.
Federal law enforcement officials said they were examining an online
conversation on 4chan, an anonymous message board, as well as other social
media, trying to determine whether any of it was linked to the gunman. In that
conversation, one writer said, “Don’t go to school tomorrow if you are in the
Northwest.”
Roseburg, about 180 miles south of Portland, with a population of 22,000, is a
part of the Pacific Northwest that in many ways has been left behind as the
region has moved on toward an economy of technology and high wages. Once a major
center for wood milling, it has struggled in recent decades as the timber
harvests in the national forests that hug the community have declined.
Wine grape cultivation has helped some, but poverty and unemployment rates are
high. In August, according to the most recent government figures, Douglas County
had an unemployment rate of 8.1 percent, tied for the second-highest in the
state. About 20 percent of residents in the city and county live below the
federal poverty line.
The college, with about 3,000 students, reflects that struggle, with many of its
students coming back to school to gain skills for a career change. The average
student is 37, and popular courses of study include winemaking, nursing, welding
and auto mechanics. “It’s a community college, so a lot of our friends and
family attend this college,” Sheriff Hanlin said.
Joe Olson, who retired as president of Umpqua Community College at the end of
June, said that within the past several months, the college had discussed hiring
an armed security guard, but had ultimately decided against it.
“We talked about that over the last year because we were concerned about safety
on campus,” he said. “The campus was split 50-50. We thought we were a very safe
campus, and having armed security officers on campus might change the culture.”
He added, though, that he did not believe a security guard could prevent a
gunman determined to kill.
“If you want to come on the campus and you want to shoot five people, you are
going to do that before our security would arrive,” he said.
Oregon is one of seven states with provisions, either from state legislation or
court rulings, that allow the carrying of concealed weapons on public
postsecondary campuses, according to the National Conference of State
Legislatures. The other states are Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Utah
and Wisconsin.
Numerous law enforcement agencies responded to Thursday’s shooting. Corey Ray, a
spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said the
agency was sending teams, including canine teams, from Seattle, Portland and
Eugene, Ore. They will join a team already on the ground that is helping search
for firearms casings and other ammunition.
The apartment complex where the gunman had lived was roped off with police tape
and under guard by deputies last night. Bronte Hart, 21, said she lived beneath
Mr. Mercer, who she said would frequently shout at her for smoking on her
balcony.
“He yelled at us, me and my husband,” said Ms. Hart, who lives in the complex
with her husband and father. “He was not a friendly type of guy. He did not want
anything to do with anyone.”
Ms. Hart and her father, Eli Loomas, said the authorities had shown up at the
complex in the morning and begun asking questions about Mr. Mercer.
Eight miles south of the college, at a cordoned-off hall on the Douglas County
Fairgrounds, family members spent agonizing hours waiting to hear of possible
victims as students were evacuated there.
“The police searched everybody,” Mr. Winder, one of the students, said,
“searching their jackets and bags for weapons before putting them on buses.”
Among those waiting were Jessica Chandler, whose daughter, 18-year-old Rebecka
Carnes, started classes at Umpqua on Monday. Her daughter, an aspiring dental
hygienist, had not responded to dozens of calls. A friend told Ms. Chandler that
the teenager had been taken to a hospital, but the police and hospital officials
would not confirm it.
“She always has her cellphone and is always in contact,” Ms. Chandler said,
smoking a cigarette outside the family waiting area. “I want to know where my
kid is.”
Many students at the school talked about tiny details that stuck with them as
they ran, and how they had tried to piece together information as they hid and
hoped to stay alive.
Joanah Fallin was headed toward the campus around 10:30 a.m. when he saw a
police car go by at what, he estimated, was 120 miles an hour. “I’ve never seen
any car go that fast,” he said.
By the time he reached campus, it was already in mayhem. “Lot of people were
crying,” he said. “There was a woman with a child. It was just unbelievable.”
Luke Rogers, another student, was in the building next door to the shooting. He
said he and his classmates were locked in the building from 10:30 a.m. until
noon, with the only access to information about the shooting coming from texts
from friends and family.
“When we exited the building, the officers made us put our hands above our heads
and leave in a single-file line,” he said. “As we passed Snyder hall, we saw the
doors open, and on the ground there were drops of blood.”
Dirk VanderHart reported from Roseburg, Kirk Johnson from Seattle
and Julie Turkewitz from Denver. Reporting was contributed by Richard Pérez-Peña
and Timothy Williams from New York, Claire Cain Miller from Roseburg, Ian Lovett
from Los Angeles, Jack Healy from Denver, Michael S. Schmidt from Washington and
Laura M. Holson from San Francisco.
A version of this article appears in print on October 2, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: Gunman Attacks Oregon College; 10 Reported
Dead.
The slaying of two journalists Wednesday as they broadcast live
to a television audience in Virginia is still seared on our screens and our
minds, but it’s a moment not only to mourn but also to learn lessons.
The horror isn’t just one macabre double-murder, but the unrelenting toll of gun
violence that claims one life every 16 minutes on average in the United States.
Three quick data points:
■ More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides every six months than have
died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq combined.
■ More Americans have died from guns in the United States since 1968 than on
battlefields of all the wars in American history.
■ American children are 14 times as likely to die from guns as children in other
developed countries, according to David Hemenway, a Harvard professor and author
of an excellent book on firearm safety.
Bryce Williams, as the Virginia killer was known to viewers when he worked as a
broadcaster, apparently obtained the gun used to murder his former co-workers
Alison Parker and Adam Ward in response to the June massacre in a South Carolina
church — an example of how gun violence begets gun violence. Williams may have
been mentally disturbed, given that he videotaped Wednesday’s killings and then
posted them on Facebook.
“I’ve been a human powder keg for a while … just waiting to go BOOM!!!!,”
Williams reportedly wrote in a lengthy fax sent to ABC News after the killings.
Whether or not Williams was insane, our policies on guns are demented — not
least in that we don’t even have universal background checks to keep weapons out
of the hands of people waiting to go boom.
The lesson from the ongoing carnage is not that we need a modern prohibition
(that would raise constitutional issues and be impossible politically), but that
we should address gun deaths as a public health crisis. To protect the public,
we regulate toys and mutual funds, ladders and swimming pools. Shouldn’t we
regulate guns as seriously as we regulate toys?
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has seven pages of regulations
concerning ladders, which are involved in 300 deaths in America annually. Yet
the federal government doesn’t make what I would call a serious effort to
regulate guns, which are involved in the deaths of more than 33,000 people in
America annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(that includes suicides, murders and accidents).
Gun proponents often say things to me like: What about cars? They kill, too, but
we don’t try to ban them!
Cars are actually the best example of the public health approach that we should
apply to guns. Over the decades, we have systematically taken steps to make cars
safer: We adopted seatbelts and airbags, limited licenses for teenage drivers,
cracked down on drunken driving and established roundabouts and better
crosswalks, auto safety inspections and rules about texting while driving.
This approach has been stunningly successful. By my calculations, if we had the
same auto fatality rate as in 1921, we would have 715,000 Americans dying
annually from cars. We have reduced the fatality rate by more than 95 percent.
Yet in the case of firearms, the gun lobby (enabled by craven politicians) has
for years tried to block even research on how to reduce gun deaths. The gun
industry made a childproof gun back in the 19th century but today has
ferociously resisted “smart guns.” If someone steals an iPhone, it requires a
PIN; guns don’t.
We’re not going to eliminate gun deaths in America. But a serious effort might
reduce gun deaths by, say, one-third, and that would be 11,000 lives saved a
year.
The United States is an outlier, both in our lack of serious policies toward
guns and in our mortality rates. Professor Hemenway calculates that the U.S.
firearm homicide rate is seven times that of the next country in the rich world
on the list, Canada, and 600 times higher than that of South Korea.
We need universal background checks with more rigorous screening, limits on gun
purchases to one a month to reduce trafficking, safe storage requirements,
serial number markings that are more difficult to obliterate, waiting periods to
buy a handgun — and more research on what steps would actually save lives. If
the federal government won’t act, states should lead.
Australia is a model. In 1996, after a mass shooting there, the country united
behind tougher firearm restrictions. The Journal of Public Health Policy notes
that the firearm suicide rate dropped by half in Australia over the next seven
years, and the firearm homicide rate was almost halved.
Here in America, we can similarly move from passive horror to take steps to
reduce the 92 lives claimed by gun violence in the United States daily. Surely
we can regulate guns as seriously as we do cars, ladders and swimming pools.
Gail Collins is on book leave.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 27, 2015, on page A23 of the
New York edition with the headline: Learning From 2 Murders.
It is an increasingly horrific fact of life and death in the
United States that easily available guns offer troubled Americans the power to
act out their grievances in public. This trend, dramatized in recent years by
macabre shootings in schools, churches, movie theaters and workplaces, was taken
to a dark new level on Wednesday in southwestern Virginia by a disturbed former
reporter who chose not only to murder two journalists as they reported live for
a television station that had fired him, but also to record and broadcast the
crime on social media.
By the numbers, the shooting was routine for this nation — three dead when the
gunman finally killed himself hours after walking up and aiming at a TV reporter
and her cameraman, as they broadcast a routine live interview to their WDBJ
audience. What was distinctive and disturbing about this tragedy was the
staging, how he filmed it and how quickly he made sure to alert his social media
followers to watch the clip that showed him aiming a pistol point-blank at the
two innocents and then shooting them with repeated volleys of gunfire.
“I filmed the shooting see Facebook,” the gunman announced to his followers on
Twitter. Many did before the grisly recording was taken down.
The questioning that follows the shootings that routinely scar, yet only
occasionally shock, a nation grown hard to them include the question of motive:
Why would he do such a terrible thing? In so many cases, and certainly in this
premeditated massacre, the answer seems to be that, amid a mass of unfathomable
grievances, the power to be seen killing innocents with one of the guns so
easily obtained around the country proves irresistible as the ultimate outlet
for an individual’s frustration and rage. In this case, the outlet provided by
social media appears to have whetted his murderous appetites.
Many politicians will focus on the gunman’s troubled personality and try to cast
this shooting as a summons for better mental health care, certainly not gun
control. Yet that ignores a grim reality: the estimated 300 million guns in
America owned by a third of the population, far more per capita than any other
modern nation. Guns are ubiquitous and easy to acquire, as statehouse
politicians, particularly Republicans, genuflect to the gun lobby to weaken, not
tighten, gun safety.
We all know no change is likely, for all the social media grotesquerie. The
woeful truth underlying this latest shooting is more mundane than alarming.
There are too many guns, and too little national will to do anything about them.
A version of this editorial appears in print on August 27, 2015, on page A22 of
the New York edition with the headline:
‘I Filmed the Shooting See Facebook’.
In one sad sense there was nothing new, or even very unusual,
about the televised killing of two journalists in Virginia on Wednesday morning.
Death on TV has occurred with frightening regularity ever since the advent of
the medium: Jack Ruby’s shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President
John F. Kennedy, in 1963; and the Sept. 11, 2001, fall of the World Trade
Center. The prospect of death appearing suddenly on our screens is as common as
it is ghoulish.
Yet in another way, the video of the Virginia shootings posted by Bryce
Williams, whose real name is Vester Lee Flanagan and who is thought to be the
gunman who killed two of his former co-workers at the television station WDBJ,
is a frightful twist in an age of online sharing and ubiquitous video
documentation.
The killings appear to have been skillfully engineered for maximum distribution,
and to sow maximum dread, over Twitter, Facebook and mobile phones. The video
Mr. Flanagan shows is an up-close, first-person execution. It was posted only
after his social media accounts had become widely known, while the police were
in pursuit of the killer. And unlike previous televised deaths, these were not
merely broadcast, but widely and virally distributed, playing out with the
complicity of thousands, perhaps millions, of social networking users who could
not help watching and sharing.
The horror was the dawning realization, as the video spread across the networks,
that the killer had anticipated the moves — that he had been counting on the
mechanics of these services and on our inability to resist passing on what he
had posted. For many, that realization came too late. On these services, the
killer knew, you often hit retweet, like or share before you realize just quite
what you have done.
Twitter and Facebook moved quickly to suspend the accounts of Mr. Flanagan. But
not quickly enough. By the time his social presence had come down, his videos
had been shared widely by journalists and ordinary users, jumping beyond the
Internet onto morning TV broadcasts, and downloaded and reposted across the
Internet — where, with some searching, they will most likely remain accessible
indefinitely.
Also found after the killings was a demo reel posted to YouTube, showing Mr.
Flanagan’s various appearances as a TV news anchor and reporter. It is
unsurprising, given his familiarity with the subject, that he appeared well
versed with what has become the media ritual of killing.
He seems to have known, for instance, that in a nation in which tens of
thousands of people are killed by firearms every year, the shooting of two
people would not become international news if it was not filmed: as is commonly
said online, “Pics, or it didn’t happen.” So he waited until WDBJ’s cameras were
broadcasting live before he acted.
But as a newshound, he seems also to have understood the morbid irresistibility
of the citizen-produced video — the shaky, point-of-view, ground level,
continuously looped recording of any incident that has become a commonplace
spectacle on television news. Thus, he made sure to produce his own video as
well. In the practice of our mobile age, he held his camera vertically, in one
hand, allowing him to hold his gun in the other.
He might have anticipated, too, that in any widely covered shooting, reporters
now rush to do an Internet search on the killer as soon as a name leaks out. Mr.
Flanagan was ready, his social accounts prepared with a professional picture and
childhood photos. Then, as soon as his name began to be mentioned online, he
appeared to have logged in to Twitter and Facebook to begin posting the outlines
of a defense and an explanation, as well as his own clip of the killings.
There was initially some doubt on Twitter about the authenticity of the killer’s
account — justified skepticism, because the quickly pulled-together profile of a
shooter has also become a hallmark of the ritual in which these incidents are
covered. But then the killer’s account, @bryce_williams7, began updating live,
erasing all doubt.
Over the course of 20 minutes on Twitter, the shooter updated his status a
half-dozen times, culminating in a post showing the video of the killings. He
quickly amassed a following of thousands, the sort of rapturous social media
welcoming that is usually reserved for pop stars and heads of state.
There was uncertainty in the sharing. Users expressed reservations as they
passed on the gunman’s profile and his tweets. People were calling on Twitter
and Facebook to act quickly to pull down his accounts. There were questions
about the journalistic ethics of posting WDBJ’s live shot and the killer’s own
document of the shooting, given that it was exactly what he had been expecting.
But these questions didn’t really slow anything down, a testament to the power
of these networks to tap into each of our subconscious, automatic desires to
witness and to share. The videos got out widely, forging a new path for
nihilists to gain a moment in the media spotlight: an example that, given its
success at garnering wide publicity, will most likely be followed by others.
A version of this article appears in print on August 27, 2015, on page A16 of
the New York edition with the headline: Violence Gone Viral, in a Well-Planned
Social Media Rollout.
ROANOKE, Va. — He was a fired television reporter with a history
of conflicts at work and rage apparently stoked by racial grievances. And when
he sought revenge on Wednesday, gunning down two former colleagues, he used the
tools of social media to ensure that his crime was broadcast live, recorded from
multiple angles and posted online.
Vester Lee Flanagan II, 41, identified by the authorities as the gunman, waited
until Alison Parker and Adam Ward, young journalists at WDBJ in Roanoke, were on
air, then killed them while recording on his own video camera. Mr. Flanagan shot
himself in the head hours later, the authorities said, but as the chase for him
was on, he wrote about the shooting on Twitter, uploaded his video to Facebook
and sent a manifesto to ABC News that spoke admiringly of mass killers and said
that as a black, gay man he had faced discrimination and sexual harassment.
The shooting and the horrifying images it produced marked a new chapter in the
intersection of video, violence and social media.
The day began with the most mundane of early-morning interviews. Ms. Parker and
Mr. Ward were working on a story for WDBJ about the 50th anniversary of Smith
Mountain Lake, a reservoir tucked among farms and rolling mountains that is
popular with anglers, kayakers and sunbathers. They stood on a balcony of
Bridgewater Plaza, a shopping and office complex on the lakeshore, talking with
Vicki Gardner, executive director of the Smith Mountain Lake Regional Chamber of
Commerce.
Around 6:45 a.m., the shooting began.
The station’s own disturbing video shows Ms. Parker screaming and stumbling
backward as the shots ring out and a set of jumbled images as the camera falls
to the floor. Eight shots can be heard before the broadcast cut back to the
stunned anchor at the station, Kimberly McBroom.
Shortly afterward, Mr. Flanagan wrote on Twitter, “I filmed the shooting see
Facebook,” and a shocking 56-second video recording, which appeared to be taken
by a body camera worn by the gunman, was posted to his Facebook page. It showed
him waiting until the journalists were on air before raising a handgun and
firing at point-blank range, ensuring that it would be seen, live or recorded,
by thousands.
Both social media accounts used the name he was known by on television, Bryce
Williams, and both were shut down within hours of the shooting.
Ms. Parker, 24, a reporter, and Mr. Ward, 27, a cameraman, both white, were
pronounced dead at the scene. Ms. Gardner was wounded and underwent emergency
surgery, but was expected to survive. Mr. Flanagan shot and killed himself hours
later after being cornered by the police on a highway about 200 miles away.
If the killings shocked the nation, they had particular resonance in this rural
area where local reporters are recognized personalities. Ms. Parker and Mr. Ward
were known as hardworking, cheerful people who had grown up here and were
romantically involved with other members of their station’s staff. At a midday
news conference, Bill Overton Jr., the Franklin County sheriff, said Ms. Parker
and Mr. Ward had interviewed him about three weeks ago, and he was watching live
on Wednesday when they were killed.
“It has really stopped me in my tracks,” he said. “Like many viewers, I was
watching this morning’s broadcast and couldn’t understand, really, what was
happening myself at that time.”
Almost two hours after the shootings, a 23-page missive faxed to ABC News
headquarters in New York, apparently from Mr. Flanagan, pointed to the June 17
shooting in Charleston, S.C., in which a white supremacist is accused of killing
nine black people in a Bible study group. ABC reported that a man claiming to be
Bryce Williams had contacted the network several times in recent weeks, saying
he had a story for them. He never said what it was.
“Why did I do it?” Mr. Flanagan said in the rambling fax message, which The New
York Times obtained from a law enforcement official. “I was already on the edge.
The church shooting was a tipping point. The victims’ initials are written on
the bullets.”
He echoed the words of the accused Charleston gunman, Dylann Roof, and spoke of
a race war. He also said Jehovah had told him to act. He spoke admiringly of the
Columbine High School killers and the gunman who carried out the Virginia Tech
massacre that left 32 people dead. At one point, he called his document a
“Suicide Note for Friends and Family.”
The fax, which also contained allegations that he was repeatedly harassed,
bullied and discriminated against for being black and gay, was turned over to
law enforcement officials. On Twitter, he made similar charges of racism and
harassment, adding that he had filed a complaint with the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, a federal agency. A spokeswoman for the agency, Kimberly
Smith-Brown, said federal law prohibited her from confirming whether the agency
had received a complaint.
“This gentleman was disturbed at the way things had turned out at some point in
his life,” Sheriff Overton said at the news conference. “Things were spiraling
out of control.”
Accounts from former colleagues, competitors and court records indicate that Mr.
Flanagan, who had graduated from San Francisco State University and worked in
several markets around the South, was a skilled broadcaster, but also volatile,
combative, threatening and prone to seeing himself as persecuted.
A video compilation of Mr. Flanagan’s reporting, of the kind reporters often
make to show prospective employers, begins, chillingly, with him holding a gun.
But at WDBJ, he typically did human-interest stories: a town with seven churches
within a three-block area; firefighters handing out free smoke detectors;
Huntfest, an annual hunting-products event at the Roanoke Civic Center; a local
man turning 100.
He worked there for less than a year before he was fired in 2013. He later sued
the station, claiming discrimination, but the case was dismissed after a judge
found the controversy had been settled. Speaking on the air Wednesday, Jeffrey
A. Marks, president and general manager of the station, confirmed that Mr.
Flanagan had filed a complaint against the station, but said it was dismissed as
baseless.
The station investigated the alleged racist comments, and “none of them could be
corroborated by anyone,” he said. “We think they were fabricated.”
“He was sort of looking out for people to say things that he could take offense
to,” Mr. Marks said. “Eventually, after many incidents of his anger coming to
the fore, we dismissed him. He did not take that well, and we had to call the
police to escort him from the building.”
Mr. Flanagan seemed to have particular animus toward Ms. Parker and Mr. Ward.
“Alison made racist comments,” he wrote on Twitter just after the shooting, an
apparent reference to Ms. Parker. Two minutes later, apparently referring to Mr.
Ward, he wrote, “Adam went to hr on me after working with me one time!!!”
Court filings in a civil lawsuit Mr. Flanagan brought against the station
documented his many confrontations. In a May 31, 2012, memo, Dan Dennison, a
WDBJ executive, wrote that Mr. Flanagan had, on three occasions, “behaved in a
manner that has resulted in one or more of your co-workers feeling threatened or
uncomfortable.”
In another memo two months later, Mr. Dennison ordered Mr. Flanagan to seek help
through the company’s employee assistance program, and stated that he engaged
“in behaviors that constitute creation of a hostile work environment.”
In a 2000 lawsuit, Mr. Flanagan also claimed to have been subjected to racial
slurs at another station where he had worked, WTWC in Tallahassee, Fla., where
he was also let go. In a court filing, the station cited among other reasons,
“misbehavior with regards to co-workers,” and the case was settled on
undisclosed terms.
“He was a good on-air performer, pretty good reporter, and then things started
getting a little strange with him,” Don Shafer, who worked with Mr. Flanagan at
WTWC, said in a broadcast on the station where he now works in San Diego. He
said that Mr. Flanagan’s contract had been terminated, in part, because of
bizarre behavior and threats to other employees.
“He turned around and sued us,” Mr. Shafer said. “He wanted to sue us for
something else, he ended up suing us for racial discrimination.”
Adam Henning, the news director at WAFF, a television station in Huntsville,
Ala., said Mr. Flanagan sought a job there in 2011, but was rejected after Mr.
Henning contacted a half-dozen references. They told him that Mr. Flanagan “was
exceedingly difficult to work with,” he said, and had once gotten into “a
physical altercation” at a company Christmas party.
After the shootings on Wednesday, Mr. Flanagan left the scene in a rented car;
his own car was parked at the Roanoke airport, Sheriff Overton said. Officials
said the police pursued him going north on Interstate 81, but did not attempt to
catch him, knowing that he was armed; it is not clear whether they lost track of
him. After he turned east on Interstate 66, heading toward Washington, a state
trooper spotted the car using a license plate reader, and after being joined by
other units, the troopers turned on their lights and tried to pull him over,
around 11:30 a.m.
“He refused to stop and sped away,” said Sgt. Rick Garletts of the State Police.
A minute or two later, “the vehicle ran off the road and into the median.”
Mr. Flanagan was found with a gunshot wound to the head and was taken to a
hospital, where he was pronounced dead two hours later.
At the stunned television station, co-workers mourned their slain colleagues.
Mr. Ward was engaged to Melissa Ott, a producer at WDBJ. His Facebook page shows
pictures of the two of them on vacation in Las Vegas and, most recently this
summer, Atlantic City.
Members of the station staff said Ms. Ott was at the station, watching the
broadcast when the shooting happened. They said it was to be her last day at the
station before she moved to Charlotte, N.C., for another job, and that Mr. Ward
was looking for work there, too.
Mr. Ward began working for WDBJ as an intern while still in college, and Mike
Stevens, a former longtime sports director at the station, called him “the most
enthusiastic intern that I ever had in 23 years of mentoring kids in that
department.”
Ms. Parker, a graduate of James Madison University, had been dating Chris Hurst,
a WDBJ anchor. “She was the most radiant woman I ever met,” Mr. Hurst wrote on
Twitter. “And for some reason she loved me back.”
“She was everything you wanted a reporter to be: tough but fair, with lots of
ideas,” said Brad Jenkins, the general manager of The Breeze, the James Madison
student newspaper. “We’re stunned.”
Ryan Parkhurst, a faculty member in the university’s School of Media Arts and
Design, said he had taught Ms. Parker in three classes and mentored her for four
years. “I’m devastated because I remember the amazing person, and that she won’t
be going after these stories,” he said.
Michael D. Shear reported from Roanoke, Alan Blinder from Atlanta, and Richard
Pérez-Peña from New York. Reporting was contributed by Hawes Spencer from
Moneta, Va., Manny Fernandez from Houston, and Katie Rogers and Alain
Delaquérière from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on August 27, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: Gunman Kills 2 on Air and Posts Carnage
Online.
Zachary Hammond, a white teenager, pulled up to a drive-through
window last week at a Hardee’s restaurant in Seneca, S.C. A sting operation was
underway, with police officers suspecting a possible drug deal.
Within minutes, an officer used his patrol car to block Mr. Hammond’s vehicle.
According to the Oconee County coroner’s report, an officer identified as Lt.
Mark Tiller then “felt threatened” as Mr. Hammond drove his car toward him. The
officer fired two shots through the open window on the driver’s side, striking
Mr. Hammond once in the shoulder and once fatally in the chest.
Eric S. Bland, a lawyer for the Hammond family, has demanded that the news media
treat the killing of Mr. Hammond as they have recent shootings of unarmed black
men, and some supporters on social media agree.
The national debate over the police and race has grown in the year since Michael
Brown was fatally shot in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 9, 2014, as the shootings of
black men have been elevated in the public eye by body cameras, dashboard camera
footage, security cameras and cellphone videos.
The firsthand footage has generated protest and social media campaigns like
#blacklivesmatter.
But the police shooting of Mr. Hammond on July 26 has so far drawn little of the
same public attention, in part because of a lack of video footage.
Thom Berry, a spokesman for the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, which
has been charged with conducting an independent investigation, said on Friday
that there was dashboard video camera footage in the Hammond shooting.
“At some point in time it will become a public record,” he said. He did not say
when.
Mr. Bland said the Hammond family had obtained an independent autopsy that shows
the young man was shot with the .45-caliber handgun in the back left shoulder
and the left side of his chest: a distinction that was not in the official
autopsy and one that he said dashed the impression that the officer was going to
be hit by the car.
The report by the county coroner, Karl E. Addis, has ruled Mr. Hammond’s death a
homicide.
Mr. Bland said the teenager’s death had fallen through the cracks of public
discourse over police killings and race, and suggested it was because it was a
“white-on-white” shooting. In the shooting of “every kid who is black or white,”
he said, “everybody should be equally offended.”
On social media, Zachary Hammond’s death spawned calls for all officers to be
required to wear body cameras, as well as questions about whether the movement
to protest police shootings was applied equally across racial lines.
The waves of mass shootings continue to roll over the United
States like surf on the ship of state’s prow. Every few weeks now we get hit
with a jolt of cold water. We shake and shudder, and then brace ourselves for
the next one.
So we beat on — a nation whose people are 20 times more likely to die of gun
violence than those of most other developed countries. The only thing
extraordinary about mass shootings in America is how ordinary the killing
grounds are — elementary schools, high schools, colleges, military recruitment
centers, theaters, parks, churches.
Is no place safe? Actually, several places are. You want protection in a country
that allows a deranged man to get an assault weapon to hunt down innocent people
in a public space? Go to the airport — that bubble of gun-free security. Or go
to a major-league baseball game, or a stadium in the National Football League.
Our big league venues may be engaging only in security theater, as critics
assert, but their owners don’t think so. They now mandate metal detectors to
snag weapons, and most of them even ban off-duty cops from bringing guns to the
games.
Nationwide, if you want to lessen your chances of getting shot, stay out of the
South. The South is the most violent region in the United States, and also the
place with the highest rate of gun ownership. More guns, easily obtained by the
mentally ill, religious fanatics and anti-government extremists, mean more gun
deaths.
Better to go to a city or state with gun restrictions, at least if you’re
playing the odds. Most of the states with tighter gun laws have fewer gun
deaths.
That’s one America, the slightly safer one. It includes government gun-screened
zones like airports, courthouses and many high schools. But more significantly,
it also covers property used by our most popular obsession, pro football — the
free market at work.
The other America is an open-fire zone, backed by politicians who think it
should be even more crowded with average people parading around with lethal
weapons. Just after the tragedy in a Louisiana theater a week ago — a shooting
by a hate-filled man who was able to legally obtain a gun despite a history of
mental illness — Rick Perry called gun-free zones a bad idea.
In his view, echoing that of the fanatics who own the Republican Party by
intimidation, everyone should be armed, everywhere. Once a shooting starts, the
bad guy with the gun will be killed by the good guy with the gun, somehow able
to get a draw on the shooter in a darkened theater, or behind a pew in church.
This scenario almost never happens. The logic is nonsense, the odds of a
perfectly timed counter-killer getting the drop on the evil killer unlikely. And
even when such a situation does happen, as in the Tucson shooting of 2011, the
armed citizen who jumps into the melee can pose a mortal threat to others. In
Tucson, an innocent person came within seconds of getting shot by an armed
bystander who wasn’t sure whom to shoot.
Most gun-free zones, like the theater in Lafayette, La., are not gun-free at
all. They have no metal detectors or screening — that would cost too much, the
theater owners claim. Gun-free is a suggestion, and therefore a misnomer.
Eventually, the more prosperous theaters in better communities will pay for
metal detectors, further setting apart the two Americas in our age of mass
shootings.
The Mall of America — more than 500 stores in four miles of retail space,
drawing 40 million annual visitors to a climate-controlled part of Minnesota —
is trying to be a gun-free zone. “Guns are banned on these premises” is the
mall’s official policy.
If the mall took up Rick Perry’s suggestion, shoppers could roam among the chain
stores packing heat, ready for a shootout. The owners of that vast operation,
similar to those who stage concerts and pro sports, think otherwise. The mall
has a security force of more than a hundred people. Yeah — I hear the joke about
the feckless mall cops. But the Mall of America trusts them more than well-armed
shoppers to protect people, as they should.
Surprising though it may seem, gun ownership is declining over all in the United
States. We are still awash with weapons — nearly a third of all American
households have an adult with a gun. But that’s down from nearly half of all
households in 1973.
What we’re moving toward, then, are regions that are safer than others, and
public spaces that are safer than others, led by private enterprise, shunning
the gun crazies who want everyone armed. The new reality comes with the
inconvenience and hassle of screening and pat-downs similar to the routines at
airports — enforced gun-free zones, not mere suggestions.
As a way to make everyday life seem less frightening, the new reality is absurd.
But that’s the cost, apparently, of an extreme interpretation of a
constitutional amendment designed to fend off British tyranny, a freedom that
has become a tyranny in itself.
Samuel Dubose was a 43-year-old unarmed black man who was shot in
the head and killed by a University of Cincinnati police officer, Ray Tensing,
during a traffic stop a few blocks from campus.
Tensing stopped Dubose on July 19 because his car didn’t have a front license
plate.
Some say Dubose’s face was “blown off.”
On Wednesday, Tensing was indicted on murder charges.
As the Hamilton County prosecutor, Joe Deters, said Wednesday, Tensing
“purposefully killed” Dubose. “This is without question a murder.”
Deters called the stop a “chicken crap stop,” Tensing’s recounting of the events
that led to the shooting “nonsense,” and the shooting itself “the most asinine
act I’ve ever seen a police officer make.”
Authorities also released Tensing’s disturbing bodycam video of the stop and
shooting.
In an exchange with the dispatcher just after the shooting, Tensing said: “I’m
not injured. I almost got ran over by the car. He took off on me. I discharged
one round, struck the man in the head.”
Indeed, the information report about the shooting repeats and even amplifies
that claim. It reads: “Officer Tensing stated that he almost was run over by the
driver of the Honda Accord and was forced to shoot the driver with his duty
weapon.” It continues: “Officer Tensing stated that he fired a single shot.
Officer Tensing repeated that he was being dragged by the vehicle and had to
fire his weapon.”
The video proves that none of that happened. To watch that video is to be
witness to an execution. What kind of person takes another person’s life so
cavalierly? How little must an officer think of the person at the other end of
the barrel to shoot him in the head when, per the video, there appears to be no
threat?
NBC News reported that an annual review of Tensing described him as “extremely
proactive” with traffic enforcement.
The NBC News report continued:
“It was unclear whether that was meant to be high praise or an indication that
he was overzealous in his policing. But a supervisor said the officer, Ray
Tensing, ‘only meets the standards when it comes to community service,’
according to records released by the university. The supervisor wrote that
Tensing should interact with the public more outside of traffic enforcement to
improve his demeanor.”
He joined the university police force a year ago and was generally well rated in
his reviews.
There are some blessings in this tragedy.
The bodycam video was vital, and refuted the officer’s account. Also, the
prosecutor moved quickly to charge the officer in the case.
But, even those steps in the right direction are not fully restorative.
Body cameras must be made mandatory countrywide. That will help with
investigations after the fact, and may indeed alter behavior, but there is no
full equipment fix for a personnel problem.
What is happening between police officers and people of color in this country is
a structural issue and must be deconstructed as such. Cameras won’t change basic
character.
This incident adds to a drumbeat of falling black bodies after interactions with
police officers. It adds to distrust about officers’ accounts of what leads to
these deaths. It adds to a corrosion of trust in the entire criminal justice
system.
Police violence may not be the greatest threat of violence to black lives —
community violence, sadly, surpasses it — but the disproportionate use of force
by some officers against black and brown people does appear to be a specific —
and very real — threat that must be addressed.
And the very idea that this violence is conducted by people acting as an arm of
government, in your name but against your body, is too hard a pill to swallow.
How can my taxes pay your salary while your actions drain blood from my body?
How is it that I have to be afraid of cops as well as criminals? Whom do I turn
to when the cops become the criminals?
How often must we hear the lamentations for justice emanate from dark faces
streaked with tears and burning with a righteous rage?
Something has to give. The carnage must be abated. Trust must be restored.
What we are living through cannot continue. People cannot long shoulder this
weight — nor should they be required to.
Police and criminal justice reform has to be a priority in our political actions
now, and into the future. We cannot wait for interpersonal racial reconciliation
to act to legally remedy systemic racial inequities.
As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once put it: “It may be true that the law
cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think
that’s pretty important.”
There simply must be more protections for citizens in these cases. There must
be!
This environment of death and distrust is a threat to the fabric of society and
to democracy itself.
A University of Cincinnati police officer was indicted on murder
charges on Wednesday in the fatal shooting of a driver this month.
In the indictment handed up by a grand jury in Hamilton County, the officer, Ray
Tensing, is accused of killing the driver, Samuel DuBose, during a traffic stop
near the campus on July 19.
At a news conference, the county prosecutor, Joe Deters, said that Officer
Tensing “purposely killed” Mr. DuBose after the officer lost his temper.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years. This is the most asinine act I’ve ever seen
a police officer make, totally unwarranted,” Mr. Deters told reporters. A video
of the episode was also released.
The death of Mr. DuBose, who was black, at the hands of Officer Tensing, who is
white, joined a string of recent episodes — in Staten Island, Cleveland, North
Charleston, S.C., and Ferguson, Mo., among others — that have raised hard
questions about law enforcement use of force, and the role of race in policing.
Video cameras have recorded many of the episodes and nonlethal encounters like
the arrest of Sandra Bland, who died three days later in a Texas jail cell,
offering disturbing evidence of the confrontations that often contradicts the
accounts of people involved.
Mr. DuBose, 43, a father of 10, was just south of the university campus, driving
a green 1998 Honda Accord without a front license plate, when Officer Tensing
began following him, according to an account that Jason Goodrich, chief of the
university police, gave on Monday. Moments later, the officer pulled Mr. Dubose
over on a side street, a few blocks from the campus, Mr. Goodrich said.
He said that when Officer Tensing asked for a driver’s license, Mr. DuBose
handed him a bottle of alcohol instead. But Mr. Goodrich gave no more insight
into the confrontation that followed, in which the officer fired one shot that
struck Mr. Dubose in the head.
Another university officer who arrived shortly after the shooting, Eric Weibel,
wrote in his report that Officer Tensing told him that “he was being dragged by
the vehicle and had to fire his weapon,” and that “Officer Tensing stated that
he was almost run over.” A third officer, he wrote, said he had seen Officer
Tensing being dragged.
“Looking at Officer Tensing’s uniform, I could see that the back of his pants
and shirt looked as if it had been dragged over a rough surface,” Officer Weibel
wrote.
On an audio recording of police radio communications, after Officer Tensing
shouted “Shots fired! Shots fired,” a dispatcher asked who was injured. It is
not clear if he replied “I am injured” or “I’m uninjured.”
“I almost got run over by the car,” the officer said. “He took off on me. I
discharged one round. Shot the man in the head.”
Another officer can later be heard saying “It was Officer Tensing that was
injured.”
At the news conference, Mr. Deters said dismissed the officer’s Tensing’s claim
that he was dragged by the car.
LAFAYETTE, La. — It was about 20 minutes into the 7 p.m. showing
of “Trainwreck” when moviegoers heard a couple of pops, like a sound effect
glitch. But when the sounds rang out again it became horribly clear that this
was something else entirely.
“From the reflection of the movie, the light, you could see his gun shining,”
said Lucas Knepper, who was seated in the same mostly empty row as the man in
the short-sleeve, button-down shirt who had begun firing at the 20 or so people
in the theater. “And then you could see the flash coming from the chamber.”
Soon two young women lay fatally shot, nine other people were wounded, and with
that, on Thursday night, Lafayette, which boasts of being the happiest city in
the country, joined Chattanooga, Tenn.; Charleston, S.C.; Aurora, Colo.;
Newtown, Conn., and so many others on the long list of cities scarred by gun
violence. The gunman, John Russell Houser, became the latest figure in a gallery
of angry men with weapons who walked into a movie theater, a church, a school or
a workplace and shattered the lives of people there.
Accounts from acquaintances, law enforcement officials and court records
portrayed Mr. Houser, 59, of Phenix City, Ala., who also took his own life, as a
man with a diffuse collection of troubles and grievances — personal, political
and social — who had a particular anger for women, liberals, the government and
a changing world.
Because he had been accused of both domestic violence and soliciting arson,
though never successfully prosecuted, he was denied a permit to carry a
concealed pistol. His family repeatedly described him as violent and mentally
ill; his mental health had been called into question going back decades, and he
spent time in a hospital receiving psychiatric care. He vandalized the house he
was evicted from last year, and tampered with the gas lines in a way that could
have caused a fire or explosion.
Given his history, he should not have been allowed to own a gun, said Sheriff
Heath D. Taylor of Russell County, where Mr. Houser lived.
President Obama has said repeatedly that each mass shooting cries out for
stricter controls to keep mentally ill people and criminals from obtaining guns,
but the issue has not resonated on the campaign trail.
The police identified the women Mr. Houser killed as Jillian E. Johnson, 33, who
owned, with her husband, two stores that sell toys, jewelry and printed goods,
and played in a bluegrass band; and Mayci Breaux, 21, recently a student at
Louisiana State University at Eunice, who was soon to start radiology school at
Lafayette General Hospital.
Using a .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol, Mr. Houser shot one man four times,
but the man survived, the police said. By Friday evening, five victims remained
in hospitals.
Mr. Houser’s instability and fury had been evident for years, said Calvin Floyd,
the former host of a television talk show in Columbus, Ga., that frequently
featured Mr. Houser as a guest in the 1990s.
“If you gave me 40 names and 40 pictures of people who might have done that, I
wouldn’t have hesitated to point him out,” he said. “I could just sense the
anger was there.”
Mr. Houser believed that women should not work outside their homes, and “had a
lot of hostility toward abortion clinics,” Mr. Floyd said. He was the sort of
person who believed “that all the trouble started when they took Bibles out of
school and stopped prayer.”
On Twitter, antigovernment discussion boards, and other forums online, a person
using the names Rusty Houser, J. Rusty Houser, and John Russell Houser praised
the Westboro Baptist Church, whose members, driven by a loathing of gays, stage
protests at military funerals; Timothy J. McVeigh, who bombed a government
building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168; and even Adolf Hitler. The
Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and antigovernment groups, said
the posts were all from Mr. Houser.
Several times, he described the United States as a “financially failing filth
farm” that deserved to collapse, and would do so soon.
Mr. Houser legally bought the gun he used in the shooting from a pawnshop in
Phenix City last year, law enforcement officials said. A purchase at a store
requires a federal background check, and serious mental illness can be grounds
for denial, but the database of prohibited buyers is imperfect.
Mr. Houser lived much of his life in Columbus, Ga., just across the
Chattahoochee River from Phenix City, and his LinkedIn profile described him as
an investment manager and entrepreneur with a law degree and an accounting
credential.
In 1989, he was accused of trying to hire a man to start a fire at a Columbus
law firm that represented pornographic theaters, which Mr. Houser opposed. A
grand jury declined to indict him, but not before a Superior Court judge in
Muscogee County ordered Mr. Houser to undergo a psychiatric examination because
his competency had “been called into question.”
He later opened a pub in LaGrange, Ga., where the local authorities accused him
of selling alcohol to minors. After his company’s liquor license was revoked, in
2001, he placed a banner with a swastika outside the pub, The LaGrange Daily
News reported at the time. He explained that “the people who used it — the Nazis
— they did what they damn well pleased.”
News Clips By WBRZ via Associated Press 1:00
Lafayette Police Identify Theater Gunman
Jim Craft, the chief of the police department in Lafayette, La., on Friday
identified and described the gunman who killed two people, and then himself, in
a movie theater on Thursday night. By WBRZ via Associated Press on Publish Date
July 24, 2015. Photo by Paul Kieu/The Daily Advertiser, via Associated Press.
Watch in Times Video »
Mr. Houser ran for local office in Columbus, Mr. Floyd said, but he was spotted
removing his opponents’ signs and ultimately withdrew from the race.
Mr. Houser also had a history of financial trouble, including a bankruptcy
filing in 2002, and a home foreclosure that led to a courthouse sale in 2014.
The Louisiana State Police superintendent, Col. Michael D. Edmonson, said Mr.
Houser’s mother recently gave him $5,000 to start anew, with talk of finding a
job in Texas, and officials said he had recently visited a church food bank.
He and his family moved to Phenix City in 2005, and that year, his wife made a
domestic violence complaint against him, but it did not lead to an arrest,
Sheriff Taylor said. The next year, the sheriff’s office refused his application
for a concealed carry permit.
In April 2008, Mr. Houser’s family members obtained a protective order against
him from a court in Carroll County, Ga., and his wife grew fearful enough that
she removed weapons from their home, court records show. The family asked that
the court involuntarily commit him to a hospital for psychiatric care; he was
subsequently admitted to a hospital in Columbus.
In court papers, family members said he had “perpetrated various acts of family
violence,” and cited “a substantial likelihood of future family violence.” They
described him as having bipolar disorder, for which he had been prescribed
medication, which he sometimes failed to take.
His condition apparently deteriorated as his daughter’s wedding approached, when
he “exhibited extreme erratic behavior,” they told the court. They said he was
vehemently opposed to the wedding, and made “ominous as well as disturbing
statements” that it would not happen.
That month, the police in Carrollton, Ga., investigated a report of a “mentally
disturbed person” after he arrived unannounced at his daughter’s office, and
later threatened another family member.
Mr. Houser lost his house in Phenix City to foreclosure, and in March 2014 an
eviction order was served, the sheriff said. A criminal complaint was later
filed accusing Mr. Houser of vandalizing the house, including damaging gas lines
and pouring cement into the plumbing.
The buyer of the house, Norman Bone; his daughter, Beth; and her boyfriend, Dan
Ramsel, described what Mr. Houser had done as booby-trapping the house, and said
his rampage required more than a year of repairs. They said he destroyed many of
its fixtures, kept hundreds of fish in the swimming pool, and left human feces
and cement throughout the house.
“He was crazy,” Ms. Bone said outside the home where Mr. Houser flew the
Confederate battle flag. “But I didn’t think he would kill someone.”
Mr. Ramsel said that Mr. Houser cultivated a reputation as “somewhat of an
anarchist.”
In March, Mr. Houser’s wife, Kellie, filed for divorce after 31 years of
marriage, listing his location as “unknown.”
It is unclear what led to the shooting in Lafayette, said Colonel Edmonson, of
the State Police. “To put a motive to it is just something that we simply can’t
do right now,” he said.
The police said Mr. Houser had been in Lafayette since July 2 or 3, staying in a
motel, and in his room there, “we found wigs and glasses and disguises,
basically,” said Chief Jim Craft of the Lafayette Police Department. They also
found journals that investigators are reviewing.
“He spoke with some people about some business opportunities maybe opening a new
business in Lafayette,” like a quick oil change service, he said.
On Thursday, Mr. Houser drove a blue 1995 Lincoln Continental, with illegally
switched license plates, to the Grand Theater on Johnston Street, one of
Lafayette’s busiest thoroughfares, where about 300 people were in the 16
auditoriums. He parked the car near an exit door.
“It is apparent that he was intent on shooting and then escaping,” Chief Craft
said. “What happened is that the quick law enforcement response forced him back
into the theater, at which time he shot himself.”
Mr. Houser bought one of just 25 tickets sold for “Trainwreck,” a comedy about a
sexually adventurous young woman, and sat down in the theater. Shortly before
7:30, he began shooting, firing at least 15 rounds. Witnesses said he stood at
the back of the auditorium, which had steeply pitched, stadium-style seating,
and fired down at others.
“He was by himself, he sat by himself, and the first two people he shot were
right in front of him,” Chief Craft said.
Two police officers who happened to be on the property fought their way through
the panicked, fleeing patrons.
Mr. Houser dropped a spent magazine and reloaded, stepping out a side door of
the theater to get to his car, but then went back into the auditorium, to evade
the approaching police officers, Chief Craft said. The officers heard four more
shots — including the final round that the gunman used to kill himself.
Campbell Robertson reported from Lafayette, Richard Pérez-Peña from New York,
and Alan Blinder from Phenix City, Ala. Leslie Turk contributed reporting from
Lafayette. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
A version of this article appears in print on July 25, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: Another Angry Face in the Gunmen’s Gallery.
LAFAYETTE, La. — Three people died and nine were wounded after a
gunman opened fire in a movie theater here on Thursday night, officials said.
The gunman was among the dead.
The shooting took place shortly before 7:30 p.m. during a showing of the comedy
“Trainwreck” at the Grand Theater in Lafayette, a 16-screen multiplex on one of
the busiest thoroughfares in the city. Chief Jim Craft of the Lafayette Police
Department said that police officers entered the theater complex while the
shooting was going on. When they got inside the theater, they found the gunman
dead of a self-inflicted wound.
Chief Craft said three people were killed, including the gunman, and the wounded
had been taken to nearby hospitals. The conditions of the wounded, he said,
“range from non life-threatening to critical.”
The victims ranged from teenagers to people in their 60s, the chief said. One
victim was in surgery, he said, and “was not doing well.”
The morning after a shooting rampage in a Louisiana movie theater on Thursday,
the police confirmed that nine people had been injured and three people,
including the gunman, had died. By AP on Publish Date July 24, 2015. Watch in
Times Video »
Chief Craft, who described the crime scene as “pretty chaotic,” said a handgun
was used in the attack. He did not release the name of the gunman, and he said
it was too soon to know his motive.
The chief said the police had determined the identity of the gunman and found
that he had a criminal history, “but it looks like it’s pretty old.” Addresses
in Louisiana and several other states had been found for the gunman, the chief
said.
Not sure that he is from Louisiana, Chief Craft said, “I think he’s from out of
state.”
Sgt. Brooks David of the Louisiana State Police said the gunman was a
58-year-old “lone white male.”
The investigation inside the theater was briefly halted late Thursday night when
the police found the gunman’s vehicle and found what they said was a “suspicious
package” inside. A bomb squad was called, and early on Friday, the vehicle’s
windows and trunk were blown up. The car was to be towed from the lot.
Sergeant Brooks said a suspicious backpack and other small items found in the
theater were being examined. A robot was brought in for use in the
investigation.
The dead would not be removed from the theater, Sergeant Brooks said, until it
was determined that it was safe for investigators and the coroner to enter.
An apartment complex behind the theater was evacuated as a precaution, the
police said.
Tanya Clark, 36, who was at the theater to see another movie, was at the
concession stand with her three children when she saw people run screaming
through the lobby.
“I thought it was just a joke,” said her son, Robert Martinez, 17. “People were
screaming.”
He said that a woman in her 60s ran past them shouting that she had been shot in
the leg. He saw blood pouring down her leg, he said.
Ms. Clark said she grabbed her 5-year-old daughter and ran, leaving her purse
and phone on the concession stand counter.
“I just grabbed her arm,” she said. “In that moment, you don’t think about
anything. That’s when you realize that your wallet and phone are not important.”
Paige Bearb, a moviegoer who was in a theater next to the one where the shooting
took place, said, “We could hear people screaming next door.”
An alarm soon sounded, and she ran outside.
“As we were running for our car, I could see people with gunshot wounds and one
lady bleeding from the leg with a T-shirt wrapped around it,” she said.
At the request of the police, a spokesman for Lafayette General Health, which
runs a number of hospitals in the region, declined to comment on Thursday night.
Col. Michael Edmonson, the superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, said
there was no information to indicate any relationship between the gunman and any
of the victims. He said that roughly 100 people were inside the auditorium at
the time of the shooting.
Chief Craft said the Lafayette Police Department had increased security at other
theaters in the city as a precaution.
President Obama was briefed on the shooting while enroute to Africa for a visit,
the White House said, and asked aides to keep him updated on the situation.
Gov. Bobby Jindal, who traveled to the scene of the shooting on Thursday night,
described it as “senseless.”
“When these kinds of acts of violence happen in a movie theater, when there’s no
real good reason why this kind of evil should intrude on the lives of families
who are just out for a night of entertainment, I know a lot of us are horrified
and shocked,” Mr. Jindal said.
He added: “This is an awful night for Lafayette. This is an awful night for
Louisiana. This is an awful night for the United States.”
Mr. Jindal said that he had spoken to two teachers who were wounded in the
shooting. One “literally jumped” on top of the other to shield her, he said,
potentially saving her life. One of the teachers who was shot in the leg “had
the presence of mind to pull the fire alarm and save other lives” after she had
been wounded, he said.
Lafayette, an oil and gas hub, has about 125,000 people and is Louisiana’s
fourth-largest city. It is on Interstate 10 about two hours west of New Orleans
and one hour west of Baton Rouge, the capital.
Leslie Turk reported from Lafayette, and Liam Stack from New York. Campbell
Robertson contributed reporting from New Orleans, Alan Blinder from Atlanta, and
Jeré Longman from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on July 24, 2015, on page A14 of the
New York edition with the headline: 3 Fatally Shot and 7 Injured at a Theater in
Louisiana.
The victims were near home or on their way back. In one case, a
man was walking with his stepsister to the subway station; in another, a man was
with friends outside his apartment.
From Friday night to Sunday morning, six people were killed in New York City —
in the Bronx and Brooklyn and on Staten Island. Five died from gunshot wounds;
the sixth died after being stabbed by his son, who was trying to put an end to
his father’s abuse, the police said.
The spate of killings comes just days after Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police
Commissioner William J. Bratton promoted the success of the Summer All Out
program, which moved about 300 officers from desk duty to patrol the streets of
some of the city’s most troubled areas.
So far this year, there have been 174 killings compared with 165 last year,
though there have been fewer over the last month — 21 — compared with 39 in the
same period in 2014.
Mr. de Blasio made the speech at a high school in the 47th Precinct in the
Bronx, where one of the killings took place on Saturday. The 47th Precinct was
the testing ground for new policing tactics last summer, after the number of
shootings that June doubled from the previous year.
In that same precinct, Odane Bentley, 24, died of a gunshot wound outside his
home in the Bronx on Friday around 11 p.m., a spokeswoman for the police said.
While a group of people were standing outside Mr. Bentley’s building, the
spokeswoman said, a sport utility vehicle drove by twice, and stopped on its
third pass of the building. A man got out of the front passenger seat and fired
several rounds toward the group.
The man got back in the car, which drove forward a few feet. He got out of the
car again, fired more shots, and re-entered the car, which sped away.
Mr. Bentley was standing in the doorway of his home when he was shot and killed.
Another victim was Stashun Thomas, 22, who was walking with his stepsister to
the subway on Friday night when he ran into a friend near their mother’s home in
East New York, Brooklyn.
Mr. Thomas stopped to talk while his stepsister kept walking, the police said.
She heard gunshots, and turned around to see her brother lying on the ground. He
was pronounced dead at Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center at 9:18
p.m.
Less than a mile from where Mr. Thomas was killed, Dustin Jackson, 37, was found
face down in the street, in the early hours of Saturday morning. He had also
been shot. The police said the investigation was continuing, and, as in the
other cases, officials had not identified any suspects.
Ray Rosello, 20, also died after he had been shot near his home, not far from
the Bronx Zoo, early Sunday. The gunman is believed to have fled on foot, the
spokeswoman said.
Around 7:40 a.m. Sunday, the police received a call that a 33-year-old man near
Grymes Hill on Staten Island had been shot in the back, the police said. He was
pronounced dead at the scene by emergency responders, and the police have not
yet released his identity.
One of the killings this weekend did not involve firearms: Hassan Razzaq, 19,
stabbed his father, Mohammed Razzaq, 56, on Saturday night at their home in
Kensington, Brooklyn, the police said.
He told the police that he and his sisters were tired of the physical abuse his
father had subjected them to and wanted to put an end to it.
Neither he nor his father had been charged with assault or domestic abuse in the
past, the police said.
A version of this article appears in print on July 20, 2015, on page A17 of the
New York edition with the headline: 6 People Killed in New York City Over the
Weekend.
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — A 24-year-old Kuwaiti-born gunman opened
fire on a military recruiting station on Thursday, then raced to a second
military site where he killed four United States Marines, prompting a federal
domestic terrorism investigation. Three other people, including a Marine Corps
recruiter and a police officer, were wounded, according to law enforcement
officials.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation identified the gunman, who also died
Thursday, as Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, who became a naturalized United States
citizen and went to high school and college in Chattanooga. Although
counterterrorism officials had not been investigating Mr. Abdulazeez before
Thursday’s shooting, federal officials familiar with the inquiry said that his
father had been investigated years ago for giving money to an organization with
possible ties to terrorists.
At a late night news conference, F.B.I. officials said that thus far they did
not have “anything that directly ties” the suspect to international terrorist
organizations.
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch said the F.B.I. was leading “a national
security investigation,” and the United States attorney for the Eastern District
of Tennessee, William C. Killian, said federal officials were “treating this as
an act of domestic terrorism.” But he, like other federal officials, cautioned
that the investigation would ultimately determine how the shooting would be
classified. Law enforcement officers swarmed the sites throughout the day and
said that they knew of no public safety concerns.
SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks terrorist activities, said that Mr.
Abdulazeez had this week posted at least two Islam-focused writings on a blog,
including one in which he described life as "short and bitter." He also said
that Muslims should not miss "the opportunity to submit to Allah."
The separate rampages, at an armed services recruiting center and a naval
reserve facility, were together the highest profile episode of violence at
domestic military installations since April 2014, when three people were killed
and more than a dozen were wounded at Fort Hood, Tex. And the killings here came
in yet another mass shooting, less than one month after nine people were killed
inside a church in Charleston, S.C.
President Obama, in what has become a grimly familiar ritual, offered his
condolences to the victims and promised a painstaking investigation. Pentagon
officials said the identities of the dead would be released after next of kin
were notified.
“My main message right now is, obviously, the deepest sympathies of the American
people to the four Marines that have been killed,” Mr. Obama told reporters in
the Oval Office after he met with the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey. “It is a
heartbreaking circumstance for these individuals, who have served our country
with great valor, to be killed in this fashion.”
Mr. Obama added, “I’d ask all Americans to pray for the families who are
grief-stricken at this point.”
Mr. Abdulazeez was not on the government’s radar, but law enforcement officials
said that his father had been under investigation years ago for possible ties to
a foreign terrorist organization. At one point, a law enforcement official said
that the father was on a terrorist watch list and was questioned while on a trip
abroad, but that he was eventually removed from the list.
The official cautioned that the investigation of the father was old and did not
generate any information on the son and did not lead to charges against the
father, the official said.
Mr. Obama said it appeared that the gunman had acted alone. According to
interviews with three counterterrorism officials, the attack fits the pattern of
assaults that the Islamic State terror group has called for, but investigators
found no immediate ties to it or other terrorist groups.
Investigators hoped that an analysis of the gunman’s computer, phone and
accounts would reveal whether he was inspired or directed. Officials said that
they expected the Islamic State to claim responsibility for the attack but said
that a claim alone would not mean anything.
Investigators said the shootings unfolded over about 30 minutes at midmorning,
first at a military recruiting center on Lee Highway and later at a naval
reserve facility on Amnicola Highway less than 10 miles away. According to
officials, the gunman used multiple weapons and shot from his car at the
recruiting center. All the fatalities occurred at the second scene, where
Marines and sailors are trained for reserve duty. A witness told law enforcement
officials that the gunman reloaded more than once there.
The authorities said that how Mr. Abdulazeez had died had not been determined.
An autopsy will be performed this weekend.
Carolyn Taylor, an employee at Binswanger Glass, which has offices across the
street from the Navy building on Amnicola Highway, said she had heard scores of
gunshots in the hours before officials announced about 1:15 p.m. that the
shooting was over.
“At least 100, at least, because it was several at one time,” said Ms. Taylor,
who added that police officers had swarmed into the area, their weapons drawn,
“and then, within seconds, we heard the gunfire.”
David Vaughn, whose commercial printing company is also nearby, said he had
heard “two loud booms” around 10:45 a.m. He soon heard multiple gunshots — he
estimated 10 or 12 — in rapid succession, and more police officers poured into
the area.
Later, he said, more bursts of gunfire erupted.
“Then, it was just silence,” he said, except for the sirens of the emergency
vehicles that rushed to the reserve building, which is nestled behind a wooded
area and is partly visible from the street.
Officials said they believed that before the rampage at the reserve building,
formally known as the Navy Operational Support Center, the gunfire began at an
armed forces recruiting center tucked into a khaki-colored strip mall where the
green hills of East Tennessee are visible in the distance. On Thursday
afternoon, more than 20 cups marking bullet casings littered the parking lot.
Yellow police tape restricted access to the lot, but numerous bullet holes were
visible in the plate glass of the recruiting center, which is wedged between a
mobile phone retailer and an Italian restaurant. The bullet holes formed a rough
horizontal line, suggesting that the gunman sprayed the weapon from one side to
the other.
Michael Usher, 37, a Chattanooga resident, was waiting near the tape for word
from his wife, Jackie Barber, who works at the phone store. He said that she had
told him the business was having a good day when the employees heard two pops.
“Pow pow,” he recalled.
Then, his wife told him, “It was rapid shots: pow pow pow pow pow pow.”
The workers dived to the ground and crawled to the back of the store. A few
minutes later, Mr. Usher said, they emerged and saw a man in a Ford Mustang
quickly leave the parking lot.
An Army spokeswoman, Kelli Bland, said four Army recruiters had been in the
building at the time of the shooting, but no one was injured.
“They did confirm there was a shooting, and that they followed the active
shooter drills that they have done in the past,” Ms. Bland said.
Federal and local officials immediately described the attack as deliberate and
targeted.
“Somebody brutally and brazenly attacked members of our armed services,” the
Chattanooga police chief, Fred Fletcher, said at a news conference, where Mayor
Andy Berke described Thursday as “a nightmare for the city.”
In a statement, the Islamic Society of Greater Chattanooga said, “We condemn
this act in the strongest possible terms as one of cowardice and hate.”
The shooting provoked a wide-ranging federal investigation, and Edward W.
Reinhold, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Knoxville division, said
he expected hundreds of bureau employees would participate in the inquiry.
The authorities on Thursday blocked Colonial Way Circle, the street in the
suburban Chattanooga neighborhood where investigators believe Mr. Abdulazeez had
lived with members of his family. Neighbors said he had drawn relatively little
notice.
“We’re all just in total shock that this happened,” Mary Winter, the president
of the neighborhood association, said. “This has been a huge shock in our
neighborhood and our community. Our hearts go out to the Marines who were
killed, but our hearts also go out to the family.”
Several hours after the shooting, F.B.I. agents, who had obtained a warrant from
a judge, began a search of the gunman’s residence. The agents were looking for
electronic devices, like computers, that analysts could examine to determine
whether Mr. Abdulazeez had connections to ISIS or another terror group.
The shooting spurred fears of subsequent attacks, and Jeh Johnson, the homeland
security secretary, said officials were “enhancing the security posture at
certain federal facilities, out of an abundance of caution.”
The day of gunfire unnerved Chattanooga, one of Tennessee’s largest cities and a
place known more for its scenery and tourism than talk of terrorism and
violence. After the shootings, local universities ordered lockdowns, and
officials investigated reports of gunfire at Bradley Square Mall, located in the
Chattanooga suburb of Cleveland.
But much of the speculation turned out to be unfounded.
“There have been no shots fired at Bradley Square Mall,” the mall’s management
said on its Facebook page, which added that a lockdown it had imposed was “a
safety precaution.”
In Chattanooga, however, the horror was vivid and wrenching. In a statement, the
Navy secretary, Ray Mabus, called the shootings “both devastating and
senseless.”
He added, “While we expect our sailors and Marines to go into harm’s way, and
they do so without hesitation, an attack at home, in our community, is insidious
and unfathomable.”
Richard Fausset reported from Chattanooga, Alan Blinder from Atlanta, and
Michael S. Schmidt from Washington. Reporting for this article was contributed
by Matt Apuzzo, Eric Schmitt, Matthew Rosenberg and Gardiner Harris from
Washington; Jess Bidgood from Boston; and Richard Pérez-Peña and Dave Philipps
from New York. Jack Begg and Elisa Cho contributed research.
A version of this article appears in print on July 17, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: Gunman Kills 4 at Military Site in
Chattanooga.
California has some of the nation’s strongest gun safety laws,
but one that requires citizens to supply a “good cause” for why they should be
granted a license to carry concealed weapons in public is under challenge.
The packing of concealed weapons by citizens is all the rage in the gun rights
movement, as more statehouses yield to the gun lobby on this issue, imposing
fewer and fewer qualifications when they do. While California has resisted this
trend, the fate of its law allowing county officials to set conditions on the
issuance of gun permits was debated last month before the United States Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
For years, the sheriffs’ offices of San Diego and Yolo Counties, acting under
the law, required that a “good cause” be offered by an applicant seeking to
carry a concealed weapon. The sheriffs properly argued that public safety was
ultimately at stake and applicants needed to cite more than their concerns about
their own safety to justify a license to carry a gun in public. Typically, those
getting permits were people who carried large sums of money, carried extremely
valuable items or faced a threat of mortal danger.
Gun rights advocates sued, challenging the “good cause” requirement as a
violation of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. They won 2 to 1 before a
three-member panel of the appeals court last year; that decision is now under
review by an 11-member panel.
Both sides in the gun debate are closely watching the case as one with the
potential to reach the Supreme Court, which ruled in 2008 that a citizen has a
right to bear arms in his home. The ruling did not offer specific guidance on
how far local gun control laws might otherwise go. Lower federal courts have
issued conflicting rulings in the licensing area, raising speculation that
another Supreme Court ruling might be prompted.
“It’s the big, looming unanswered question under the Second Amendment — whether
you have a right to carry in public, and under what conditions,” Adam Winkler, a
law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told The Wall Street
Journal.
Gun rights advocates point out that some California counties are more lenient
and do not require a “good cause” explanation from applicants. That hardly
justifies scuttling the right and duty of other communities to determine what is
necessary for their citizens’ safety. Despite the gun lobby’s absolutist
outcries, the right to bear arms remains a qualified one, subject to reasonable
controls, particularly a “good cause” justification.
A version of this editorial appears in print on July 3, 2015, on page A20 of the
New York edition with the headline: A Sensible Question for Gun Owners.
CHARLESTON, S.C. — On the day that Dylann Roof peered into a
camera and spoke his first words in court last week, Alana Simmons, whose
grandfather was killed at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, was not
prepared to stand up and talk. Her presence, she thought, would be enough.
But then she heard Nadine Collier, in a startling moment of anguish and grace,
address Mr. Roof, the man accused of shooting nine church members to death. “I
forgive you and have mercy on your soul,” said Ms. Collier, whose mother, Ethel
Lance, was one of the victims.
At that moment, Ms. Simmons said, her own path became clear, and she joined
other relatives of the dead in expressing both their pain and forgiveness to the
man charged with causing such despair. “We are here to combat hate-filled
actions with love-filled actions,” Ms. Simmons said. “And that is what we want
to get out to the world.”
As the first of the funerals begin Thursday, the nine families are still
pondering the effect their words — allowing love and forgiveness to crowd out
hate and vengeance — have had on the nation.
This is not to say that the families do not feel moments of rage and heartbreak.
Nor should their forgiveness be mistaken for acceptance.
“Are we hurting? Yes,” said Leon Alston, a steward at Emanuel. “Do we want
justice done? Yes. Do we want hatred to stop? Yes. Do we want him to pay for his
crime? Yes.”
Since the shooting, the debate over Confederate symbols has reached a tipping
point around the country, while the families’ humanity in the face of calamity
has transformed, at least for the moment, the nation’s usually polarized debates
on race.
Their hope, they say, is that their message will stand in contrast to the anger
and violence that has riven other communities, including Ferguson, Mo., and
Baltimore, in the wake of police shootings.
“We have been taught forgiveness,” said Jamila Gadsden, 37.
Her uncle, the Rev. Anthony Thompson, lost his wife, Myra, at the church, but in
court, he urged Mr. Roof to repent, confess and give his life to Christ.
“And we have our angry moments, but that is not what we focus on,” Ms. Gadsden
said. “I just think that after everything that has happened in other communities
across the country, that this gives people something to think about. If it
doesn’t make you think, there is nothing we can do.”
Ms. Simmons said that in honor of her slain grandfather, the Rev. Daniel Lee
Simmons Sr., she and her relatives have spearheaded a social media campaign
called the Hate Won’t Win Challenge, which calls on people to “commit an act of
love” and post it on Facebook or Instagram.
The families had not consulted on a course of action before the court hearing.
In fact, they had scarcely exchanged words. The last time many of them had seen
one another was the night of the shooting.
Instead, they spoke individually, from the heart. And their words reflected
those that many of them were weaned on at Mother Emanuel, as the church is
known. One motto there is, “We enter to worship, we depart to serve.”
Mrs. Thompson, 59, one of 14 siblings, including four sets of twins, was raised
at Mother Emanuel. She lived within walking distance of the sanctuary on Calhoun
Street and grew up in the church pews with her family, which is as tight-knit as
it is sprawling.
Known for her “comforting spirit,” Mrs. Thompson, a mother of two, was the quiet
one of the family, the one who would listen without judgment and hear without
interruption, said her sister Eunice C. Guyton. Once a guidance counselor at a
local middle school, Mrs. Thompson told her sister that God had called her to do
his work and join the ministry at Emanuel.
On the night the gunman walked into Emanuel, Mrs. Thompson was leading the Bible
study group. Turning anyone away from God’s house would have been unthinkable to
her, Ms. Guyton said. The group discussed a verse from Mark 4 about the soil in
which the word of God is sown; not all soil is rooted deeply enough to receive
the word, the passage states.
Started when slavery was a way of life here, Emanuel has always brought
sustenance and peace to its members.
“Emanuel does not harbor hate in her heart,” Ms. Guyton said. “That’s not the
God we serve. It’s important for us to know that the young man is a mother’s
son, a father’s son. If he can earnestly repent, God will hear him.”
Mr. Alston, the steward, said many of the relatives of the victims had been
coming to Emanuel for years and had heard this message repeated again and again.
“These people were taught very well about right and wrong, about the loving and
the teaching of the holy word,” Mr. Alston said. “For them to forgive in such a
short period of time speaks volumes to who they are and who their loved ones
were.”
Speaking from her parents’ home, Bethane Middleton Brown repeated, as she did in
court, that she is “a work in progress,” acknowledging the anger she feels. Her
sister and confidante, DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49, died at Emanuel. In the
wake of the killing spree, Ms. Middleton Doctor’s four daughters are now
motherless; the youngest is 11 and the oldest is a senior in college. Their
mother was the center of their world, she said.
But sitting in court that day, Ms. Middleton Brown thought hard about her
sister; not just her death, but how her sister led her life. Through hardships,
and there were many, including bouts of unemployment and a recent difficult
divorce, her sister made a point to be virtuous and not cast aspersions on
others. She clung fiercely to her faith.
“She was the female Job,” Ms. Middleton Brown said of her sister, who was
studying to be a minister at Emanuel. “She had been through so much. It was like
you could touch her body, her flesh, but not her soul.”
In court, she told Mr. Roof that the Middletons were a family that “love built.”
And in this, she stands firm: “Forgiveness is the only way. Others may not agree
with me but that’s the way it has to be.”
As for the future, she agrees with Mr. Alston. If forgiveness among relatives
has come so soon after the deaths, then their feelings will probably withstand
the path through the criminal justice proceedings.
But Ms. Middleton Brown said she must also believe there is reason for all of
this bloodshed, something larger down the road.
“I believe that our God is a god of purpose,” she said.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
A version of this article appears in print on June 25, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: Families Hope Words Endure Past Shooting.
Suppose African-Americans marked their heritage with flags
depicting Nat Turner’s rebellion of 1831, in which slaves massacred about 60
whites before the uprising was crushed? The flag wouldn’t be celebrating the
murder of whites, of course, but would simply commemorate a factual milestone in
black history!
Suppose Mexican-Americans waved a flag depicting the battle of the Alamo? The
point would not be to celebrate the slaughter of Texans, but to express pride in
Mexican heritage!
Suppose Canadian-Americans displayed a flag showing the burning of the White
House in the War of 1812? Nothing against the Yanks, mind you — just a point of
Canadian historical pride!
Suppose American women waved flags of Lorena Bobbitt, who reacted to domestic
abuse in 1993 by severing her husband’s penis and throwing it into a field? The
aim wouldn’t be to approve of sexual mutilation, of course — but Bobbitt’s
subsequent acquittal was a landmark in the recognition of domestic violence!
Well, you get the point. That’s how the Confederate battle flag looked to many
of us. And at least Nat Turner was fighting for his own freedom, while the
Confederate battle flag was the banner of those who fought freedom, defended
slavery, clubbed civil rights workers — and, most recently, murdered black
churchgoers. And it’s exhilarating to see the same distaste expressed in the
Southern mainstream.
Continue reading the main story
Let's celebrate the drawing down of the Confederate battle flag — and then let's
pivot from symbolic moves to substantial ones.
“The Confederate battle flag was the emblem of Jim Crow defiance to the civil
rights movement, of the Dixiecrat opposition to integration, and of the domestic
terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan,” noted Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist
Convention. “White Christians ought to think about what that flag says to our
African-American brothers and sisters.”
The last year has brought a far-reaching conversation about race in America. But
much of that conversation seemed polarizing more than clarifying, leaving each
side more entrenched than ever — so it’s thrilling to see a wave of action now.
South Carolina may finally remove the flag from the State House grounds, Alabama
has removed four Confederate flags from its state Capitol grounds, and
Mississippi may also take a Confederate battle cross off the state flag.
Virginia, Tennessee, Maryland and North Carolina seem poised to keep the
Confederate flag off license plates. A bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the
Confederate general and early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, is expected to be
evicted from the Tennessee State House. Walmart, Sears, Amazon, e-Bay and other
retailers will no longer sell Confederate merchandise.
So we’re finally seeing not just conversation but movement.
But the movement is in some ways chimerical. It’s about a symbol — and now the
progress on the symbol needs to be matched by progress on racial inequality in
daily life.
America’s greatest shame in 2015 is not a piece of cloth. It’s that a black boy
has a life expectancy five years shorter than a white boy. It’s that the net
worth of the average black household in 2011 was $6,314, compared with $110,500
for the average white household, according to census data.
It’s that almost two-thirds of black children grow up in low-income families.
It’s that more than one-third of inner-city black kids suffer lead poisoning
(and thus often lifelong brain impairment), mostly from old lead paint in
substandard housing.
More consequential than that flag is our flawed system of school finance that
perpetuates inequity. Black students in America are much less likely than whites
to attend schools offering advanced science and math courses.
The one public system in which America goes out of its way to provide services
to African-Americans is prison. Partly because of our disastrous experiment in
mass incarceration, black men in their 20s without a high school diploma are
more likely to be incarcerated than employed, according to a study by the
National Bureau of Economic Research.
So I’m all for celebrating the drawing down of the Confederate battle flag, but
now let’s pivot from symbolic moves to substantial ones.
That means, for example, early childhood programs, which offer the most
cost-effective interventions to create a more even starting line. These include
home visitation, high-quality preschool and literacy programs.
A Stanford University randomized trial examined a simple, inexpensive program
called Ready4K!, which simply sent three text messages a week to parents to
encourage them to read to their preschoolers — and it was astonishingly
successful. Parents read more to children, who then experienced learning gains —
and this was particularly true of black and Hispanic children. And because this
was text messaging, the cost was less than $1 a family for the whole school
year.
So, sure, good riddance to Confederate flags across the country! And then let’s
swivel to address the larger national disgrace: In 2015, so many children still
don’t have an equal shot at life because of the color of their skin.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 25, 2015, on page A27 of the
New York edition with the headline: Tearing Down the Confederate Flag Is Just a
Start.
WASHINGTON — In the 14 years since Al Qaeda carried out attacks
on New York and the Pentagon, extremists have regularly executed smaller lethal
assaults in the United States, explaining their motives in online manifestoes or
social media rants.
But the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as a
surprise. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by
white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than
by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim,
compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New
America, a Washington research center.
The slaying of nine African-Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church last week,
with an avowed white supremacist charged with their murders, was a particularly
savage case. But it is only the latest in a string of lethal attacks by people
espousing racial hatred, hostility to government and theories such as those of
the “sovereign citizen” movement, which denies the legitimacy of most statutory
law. The assaults have taken the lives of police officers, members of racial or
religious minorities and random civilians.
Non-Muslim extremists have carried out 19 such attacks since Sept. 11, according
to the latest count, compiled by David Sterman, a New America program associate,
and overseen by Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert. By comparison, seven lethal
attacks by Islamic militants have taken place in the same period.
If such numbers are new to the public, they are familiar to police officers. A
survey to be published this week asked 382 police and sheriff’s departments
nationwide to rank the three biggest threats from violent extremism in their
jurisdiction. About 74 percent listed antigovernment violence, while 39 percent
listed “Al Qaeda-inspired” violence, according to the researchers, Charles
Kurzman of the University of North Carolina and David Schanzer of Duke
University.
“Law enforcement agencies around the country have told us the threat from Muslim
extremists is not as great as the threat from right-wing extremists,” said Dr.
Kurzman, whose study is to be published by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and
Homeland Security and the Police Executive Research Forum.
John G. Horgan, who studies terrorism at the University of Massachusetts Lowell,
said the mismatch between public perceptions and actual cases has become
steadily more obvious to scholars.
“There’s an acceptance now of the idea that the threat from jihadi terrorism in
the United States has been overblown,” Dr. Horgan said. “And there’s a belief
that the threat of right-wing, antigovernment violence has been underestimated.”
Counting terrorism cases is a notoriously subjective enterprise, relying on
shifting definitions and judgment calls.
If terrorism is defined as ideological violence, for instance,
should an attacker who has merely ranted about religion, politics or race be
considered a terrorist? A man in Chapel Hill, N.C., who was charged with fatally
shooting three young Muslim neighbors had posted angry critiques of religion,
but he also had a history of outbursts over parking issues. (New America does
not include this attack in its count.)
Likewise, what about mass killings in which no ideological motive is evident,
such as those at a Colorado movie theater and a Connecticut elementary school in
2012? The criteria used by New America and most other research organizations
exclude such attacks, which have cost more lives than those clearly tied to
ideology.
Some killings by non-Muslims that most experts would categorize as terrorism
have drawn only fleeting news media coverage, never jelling in the public
memory. But to revisit some of the episodes is to wonder why.
In 2012, a neo-Nazi named Wade Michael Page entered a Sikh temple in Wisconsin
and opened fire, killing six people and seriously wounding three others. Mr.
Page, who died at the scene, was a member of a white supremacist group called
the Northern Hammerskins.
In another case, in June 2014, Jerad and Amanda Miller, a married couple with
radical antigovernment and neo-Nazi views, entered a Las Vegas pizza restaurant
and fatally shot two police officers who were eating lunch. On the bodies, they
left a swastika, a flag inscribed with the slogan “Don’t tread on me” and a note
saying, “This is the start of the revolution.” Then they killed a third person
in a nearby Walmart.
And, as in the case of jihadist plots, there have been sobering close calls. In
November 2014 in Austin, Tex., a man named Larry McQuilliams fired more than 100
rounds at government buildings that included the Police Headquarters and the
Mexican Consulate. Remarkably, his shooting spree hit no one, and he was killed
by an officer before he could try to detonate propane cylinders he had driven to
the scene.
Some Muslim advocates complain that when the perpetrator of an attack is not
Muslim, media commentators quickly focus on the question of mental illness.
“With non-Muslims, the media bends over backward to identify some psychological
traits that may have pushed them over the edge,” said Abdul Cader Asmal, a
retired physician and a longtime spokesman for Boston’s Muslim community.
“Whereas if it’s a Muslim, the assumption is that they must have done it because
of their religion.”
On several occasions since President Obama took office, efforts by government
agencies to conduct research on right-wing extremism have run into resistance
from Republicans, who suspected an attempt to smear conservatives.
A 2009 report by the Department of Homeland Security, which warned that an
ailing economy and the election of the first black president might prompt a
violent reaction from white supremacists, was withdrawn in the face of
conservative criticism. Its main author, Daryl Johnson, later accused the
department of “gutting” its staffing for such research.
William Braniff, the executive director of the National Consortium for the Study
of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, said the
outsize fear of jihadist violence reflects memories of Sept. 11, the daunting
scale of sectarian conflict overseas and wariness of a strain of Islam that
seems alien to many Americans.
“We understand white supremacists,” he said. “We don’t really feel like we
understand Al Qaeda, which seems too complex and foreign to grasp.”
The contentious question of biased perceptions of terrorist threats dates back
at least two decades, to the truck bombing that tore apart the federal building
in Oklahoma City in April 1995. Some early media speculation about the attack
assumed that it had been carried out by Muslim militants. The arrest of Timothy
McVeigh, an antigovernment extremist, quickly put an end to such theories.
The bombing, which killed 168 people, including 19 children, remains the
second-deadliest terrorist attack in American history, though its toll was
dwarfed by the roughly 3,000 killed on Sept 11.
“If there’s one lesson we seem to have forgotten 20 years after Oklahoma City,
it’s that extremist violence comes in all shapes and sizes,” said Dr. Horgan,
the University of Massachusetts scholar. “And very often it comes from someplace
you’re least suspecting.”
I DO NOT forgive Dylann Roof, a racist terrorist whose name I
hate saying or knowing. I have no immediate connection to what happened in
Charleston, S.C., last week beyond my humanity and my blackness, but I do not
foresee ever forgiving his crimes, and I am wholly at ease with that choice.
My unwillingness to forgive this man does not give him any kind of power. I am
not filled with hate for this man because he is beneath my contempt. I do not
believe in the death penalty so I don’t wish to see him dead. My lack of
forgiveness serves as a reminder that there are some acts that are so terrible
that we should recognize them as such. We should recognize them as beyond
forgiving.
I struggle with faith but I was raised Catholic. I believe God is a God of love
but cannot understand how that love is not powerful enough to save us from
ourselves. As a child, I learned that forgiveness requires reconciliation by way
of confession and penance. We must admit our sins. We must atone for our sins.
When I went to confession each week, I told the priest my childish sins —
fighting with my brothers, saying a curse word, the rather minor infractions of
a sheltered Nebraska girl. When I didn’t have a sin to confess, I made something
up, which was also a sin. After confession, I knelt at a pew and did my penance,
and thought about the wrong I had done and then I tried to be better. I’m not
sure I succeeded all that often.
Ever the daydreamer, I spent most of my time in Sunday Mass lost in my
imagination. The one prayer that stayed with me was “Our Father” and the line
“and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” I
always got stuck on that part. It’s a nice idea that we could forgive those who
might commit the same sins we are apt to commit but surely, there must be a
line. Surely there are some trespasses most of us would not commit. What then?
Forgiveness does not come easily to me. I am fine with this failing. I am
particularly unwilling to forgive those who show no remorse, who don’t
demonstrate any interest in reconciliation. I do not believe there has been
enough time since this terrorist attack for anyone to forgive. The bodies of the
dead are still being buried. We are still memorizing their names: Cynthia Hurd,
Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton Doctor, Clementa C. Pinckney,
Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons Sr., Sharonda Coleman-Singleton and Myra
Thompson.
We are still memorizing these names but the families who loved the people who
carried these names have forgiven Dylann Roof. They offered up testimony in
court, less than 48 hours after the trauma of losing their loved ones in so
brutal a manner. Alana Simmons, who lost her grandfather, said, “Although my
grandfather and the other victims died at the hands of hate, everyone’s plea for
your soul is proof that they lived in love, and their legacies will live in
love.” Nadine Collier, who lost her mother, said: “You took something very
precious away from me. I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able
to hold her again. But I forgive you and have mercy on your soul.”
I deeply respect the families of the nine slain who are able to forgive this
terrorist and his murderous racism. I cannot fathom how they are capable of such
eloquent mercy, such grace under such duress.
Nine people are dead. Nine black people are dead. They were murdered in a
terrorist attack.
Over the weekend, newspapers across the country shared headlines of forgiveness
from the families of the nine slain. The dominant media narrative vigorously
embraced that notion of forgiveness, seeming to believe that if we forgive we
have somehow found a way to make sense of the incomprehensible.
We are reminded of the power of whiteness. Predictably, alongside the
forgiveness story, the media has tried to humanize this terrorist. They have
tried to understand Dylann Roof’s hatred because surely, there must be an
explanation for so heinous an act. At the gunman’s bond hearing, the judge, who
was once reprimanded for using the N-word from the bench, talked about how not
only were the nine slain and their families victims, but so were the relatives
of the terrorist. There are no limits to the power of whiteness when it comes to
calls for mercy.
The call for forgiveness is a painfully familiar refrain when black people
suffer. White people embrace narratives about forgiveness so they can pretend
the world is a fairer place than it actually is, and that racism is merely a
vestige of a painful past instead of this indelible part of our present.
Black people forgive because we need to survive. We have to forgive time and
time again while racism or white silence in the face of racism continues to
thrive. We have had to forgive slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynching,
inequity in every realm, mass incarceration, voter disenfranchisement,
inadequate representation in popular culture, microaggressions and more. We
forgive and forgive and forgive and those who trespass against us continue to
trespass against us.
Mr. Roof’s racism was blunt and raggedly formed. It was bred by a culture in
which we constantly have to shout “Black lives matter!” because there is so much
evidence to the contrary. This terrorist was raised in this culture. He made
racist jokes with his friends. He shared his plans with his roommate. It’s much
easier to introduce forgiveness into the conversation than to sit with that
reality and consider all who are complicit.
What white people are really asking for when they demand forgiveness from a
traumatized community is absolution. They want absolution from the racism that
infects us all even though forgiveness cannot reconcile America’s racist sins.
They want absolution from their silence in the face of all manner of racism,
great and small. They want to believe it is possible to heal from such profound
and malingering trauma because to face the openness of the wounds racism has
created in our society is too much. I, for one, am done forgiving.
Roxane Gay is the author of “An Untamed State” and “Bad Feminist” and a
contributing opinion writer.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 24, 2015, on page A23 of the
New York edition with the headline: Why I Can’t Forgive the Killer in
Charleston.
America is a much less racist nation than it used to be, and I’m
not just talking about the still remarkable fact that an African-American
occupies the White House. The raw institutional racism that prevailed before the
civil rights movement ended Jim Crow is gone, although subtler discrimination
persists. Individual attitudes have changed, too, dramatically in some cases.
For example, as recently as the 1980s half of Americans opposed interracial
marriage, a position now held by only a tiny minority.
Yet racial hatred is still a potent force in our society, as we’ve just been
reminded to our horror. And I’m sorry to say this, but the racial divide is
still a defining feature of our political economy, the reason America is unique
among advanced nations in its harsh treatment of the less fortunate and its
willingness to tolerate unnecessary suffering among its citizens.
Of course, saying this brings angry denials from many conservatives, so let me
try to be cool and careful here, and cite some of the overwhelming evidence for
the continuing centrality of race in our national politics.
My own understanding of the role of race in U.S. exceptionalism was largely
shaped by two academic papers.
The first, by the political scientist Larry Bartels, analyzed the move of the
white working class away from Democrats, a move made famous in Thomas Frank’s
“What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Mr. Frank argued that working-class whites were
being induced to vote against their own interests by the right’s exploitation of
cultural issues. But Mr. Bartels showed that the working-class turn against
Democrats wasn’t a national phenomenon — it was entirely restricted to the
South, where whites turned overwhelmingly Republican after the passage of the
Civil Rights Act and Richard Nixon’s adoption of the so-called Southern
strategy.
And this party-switching, in turn, was what drove the rightward swing of
American politics after 1980. Race made Reaganism possible. And to this day
Southern whites overwhelmingly vote Republican, to the tune of 85 or even 90
percent in the deep South.
The second paper, by the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce
Sacerdote, was titled “Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-style
Welfare State?” Its authors — who are not, by the way, especially liberal —
explored a number of hypotheses, but eventually concluded that race is central,
because in America programs that help the needy are all too often seen as
programs that help Those People: “Within the United States, race is the single
most important predictor of support for welfare. America’s troubled race
relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare
state.”
Now, that paper was published in 2001, and you might wonder if things have
changed since then. Unfortunately, the answer is that they haven’t, as you can
see by looking at how states are implementing — or refusing to implement —
Obamacare.
For those who haven’t been following this issue, in 2012 the Supreme Court gave
individual states the option, if they so chose, of blocking the Affordable Care
Act’s expansion of Medicaid, a key part of the plan to provide health insurance
to lower-income Americans. But why would any state choose to exercise that
option? After all, states were being offered a federally-funded program that
would provide major benefits to millions of their citizens, pour billions into
their economies, and help support their health-care providers. Who would turn
down such an offer?
The answer is, 22 states at this point, although some may eventually change
their minds. And what do these states have in common? Mainly, a history of
slaveholding: Only one former member of the Confederacy has expanded Medicaid,
and while a few Northern states are also part of the movement, more than 80
percent of the population in Medicaid-refusing America lives in states that
practiced slavery before the Civil War.
And it’s not just health reform: a history of slavery is a strong predictor of
everything from gun control (or rather its absence), to low minimum wages and
hostility to unions, to tax policy.
So will it always be thus? Is America doomed to live forever politically in the
shadow of slavery?
I’d like to think not. For one thing, our country is growing more ethnically
diverse, and the old black-white polarity is slowly becoming outdated. For
another, as I said, we really have become much less racist, and in general a
much more tolerant society on many fronts. Over time, we should expect to see
the influence of dog-whistle politics decline.
But that hasn’t happened yet. Every once in a while you hear a chorus of voices
declaring that race is no longer a problem in America. That’s wishful thinking;
we are still haunted by our nation’s original sin.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 22, 2015, on page A19 of the
New York edition with the headline: Slavery’s Long Shadow.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — A VARIETY of clues to the motives of Dylann
Storm Roof, the suspect in last week’s mass shooting at Emanuel African
Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., have emerged. First, we saw the
patches he wore on his jacket in a Facebook photo: the flags of regimes in South
Africa and Rhodesia that brutally enforced white minority rule.
Then, a further cache of photos of Mr. Roof — seen in several bearing a
Confederate flag — was discovered on a website, Last Rhodesian, registered in
his name, together with a manifesto, a hodgepodge of white supremacist ideas.
The author (most likely Mr. Roof) calls on whites to take “drastic action” to
regain dominance in America and Europe.
These themes, popular among white supremacists in the United States, are also
signs of the growing globalization of white nationalism. When we think of the
Islamist terrorism of groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, we recognize
their international dimension. When it comes to far-right domestic terrorism, we
don’t.
Americans tend to view attacks like the mass murder in Charleston as isolated
hate crimes, the work of a deranged racist or group of zealots lashing out in
anger, unconnected to a broader movement. This view we can no longer afford to
indulge.
When, according to survivors, Mr. Roof told the victims at the prayer meeting
that black people were “taking over the country,” he was expressing sentiments
that unite white nationalists from the United States and Canada to Europe,
Australia and New Zealand. Unlike those of the civil rights era, whose main goal
was to maintain Jim Crow in the American South, today’s white supremacists don’t
see borders; they see a white tribe under attack by people of color across the
globe.
The end of white rule in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, they believe,
foreshadowed an apocalyptic future for all white people: a “white genocide” that
must be stopped before it’s too late. To support this view, they cite the
murders of white farmers in South Africa since the end of apartheid.
In recent years, extremists have distilled the notion of white genocide to “the
mantra,” parts of which show up on billboards throughout the South, as well as
in Internet chat rooms. It proclaims “Diversity = White Genocide” and “Diversity
Means Chasing Down the Last White Person,” blaming multiculturalism for
undermining the “white race.” The white nationalist American Freedom Party has
made the mantra’s author, a segregationist from South Carolina named Robert
Whitaker, its vice-presidential candidate in 2016.
White supremacists across the country, some displaying the apartheid South
African flag, have participated in “White Man Marches” to raise awareness of the
so-called white genocide. A neo-Confederate group, the League of the South, also
uses the white genocide argument to call for laws against interracial marriage.
White nationalist leaders are traveling abroad to strengthen their international
networks. At the Southern Poverty Law Center, we have documented more than 30
instances in the past two years. In 2013, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance,
a group that publishes pseudo-academic articles purporting to show the
inferiority of black people, addressed groups of white nationalists in Britain
and France on their common cause. “The fight in Europe is exactly the same as
ours,” he said.
The movement is bound to produce more violence, not necessarily from organized
groups but from lone wolves like Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist
who killed more than 70 people in his country in 2011 because he wanted “to save
Europe from Islam.” Mr. Breivik had ties to American white nationalists as a
registered user of Stormfront, a web forum founded by a former Ku Klux Klan
leader that has more than 300,000 members (about two-thirds are American).
Europe has also seen the rise of a powerful, far-right political movement that
rejects multiculturalism. The anti-Semitic Jobbik Party in Hungary and the
neo-fascist Golden Dawn in Greece are prime examples. In Germany, there has been
a series of murders by neo-Nazis. Britain, too, is experiencing an upswing of
nationalist, anti-immigrant politics.
This month, S.P.L.C. staffers will join activists from the United States and
Europe at a conference in Budapest about this transnational white supremacism
that is emerging as the world grows more connected by technology. The message of
white genocide is spreading. White nationalists look beyond borders for
confirmation that their race is under attack, and they share their ideas in the
echo chamber of racist websites.
The days of thinking of domestic terrorism as the work of a few Klansmen or
belligerent skinheads are over. We know Islamic terrorists are thinking
globally, and we confront that threat. We’ve been too slow to realize that white
supremacists are doing the same.
Morris Dees is the founder, and J. Richard Cohen the president, of the Southern
Poverty Law Center.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 22, 2015, on page A19 of the
New York edition with the headline: Racists Without Borders.
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Dylann Roof spat on and burned the American
flag, but waved the Confederate.
He posed for pictures wearing a No. 88 T-shirt, had 88 Facebook friends and
wrote that number — white supremacist code for “Heil Hitler”— in the South
Carolina sand.
A website discovered Saturday appears to offer the first serious look at Mr.
Roof’s thinking, including how the case of Trayvon Martin, the black Florida
teenager shot to death in 2012 by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch
volunteer, triggered his racist rage. The site shows a stash of 60 photographs,
many of them of Mr. Roof at Confederate heritage sites or slavery museums, and
includes a nearly 2,500-word manifesto in which the author criticized blacks as
being inferior while lamenting the cowardice of white flight.
“I have no choice,” it reads. “I am not in the position to, alone, go into the
ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my
state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country.
We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the
internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and
I guess that has to be me.”
The website was first registered on Feb. 9 in the name of Dylann Roof, the
21-year-old man charged with entering the historically black Emanuel A.M.E.
Church in Charleston on Wednesday night, attending a prayer meeting for an hour
and then murdering nine parishioners. The day after the site was registered, the
registration information was intentionally masked.
It is not clear whether the manifesto was written by Mr. Roof or if he had
control of it. Nor is it clear whether he took the pictures with a timer, or if
someone else took them. In a joint statement Saturday night, the Charleston
Police Department and the F.B.I. said they were aware of the website and were
“taking steps to verify the authenticity of these postings.”
If it is genuine, as his friends seem to think, the tourist sites he visited,
the pictures that were posted and the hate-filled words on the site offered a
chilling glimpse into the interests of an unemployed former landscaper said to
have a fixation on race.
“This whole racist thing came into him within the past five years,” said Caleb
Brown, a childhood friend of Mr. Roof’s who is half black. “He was never really
popular; he accepted that. He wasn’t like: ‘When I grow up I am going to show
all these kids.’ He accepted who he was, and who he was changed, obviously.”
Mr. Roof has been charged with nine counts of murder in the killings. Victims
included the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, who was both the church pastor and a
state senator.
Mr. Roof’s friends say that he only spoke of his murderous plans once — when he
recently warned that he planned to do something crazy with the gun he had
purchased with the money he got from his parents for his 21st birthday. But they
say his sense of racial grievance began with the Trayvon Martin case.
The website, the lastrhodesian.com, which was not working by Saturday afternoon,
featured a photo of a bloodied dead white man on the floor. The picture appears
to be an image from “Romper Stomper,” an Australian movie about neo-Nazis. The
domain name is a reference to the white minority of what is now Zimbabwe, where
whites fought blacks for 15 years and enlisted white supremacists as
mercenaries.
The site was first discovered by a blogger who goes by the pen name Emma
Quangel, who paid $49 for a reverse domain search that turned up the site.
According to web server logs, the manifesto was last modified at 4:44 p.m.
Eastern time on Wednesday, the day of the Charleston shootings, and the essay
notes, “at the time of writing I am in a great hurry.”
In the manifesto, Mr. Roof writes: “The event that truly awakened me was the
Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I
decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable
to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the
right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words ‘black on
White crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day.”
The manifesto also says he learned from the website of the far-right Council of
Conservative Citizens. The council is an offshoot of a 1950s-era organization
that fought school desegregation. A message on its website says the group is
“deeply saddened by the Charleston killing spree.”
The killing of nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in
Charleston, S.C., is among a long list of attacks targeting predominantly black
churches in the United States.
A friend of Mr. Roof’s, Jacob Meek, 15, said the references to the Trayvon
Martin case made it clear that Mr. Roof had written the essay. “That’s his
website,” he said. “He wrote it, and I just can tell.”
Watchdog groups that track right-wing extremism say the manifesto reflects the
language found in white supremacist forums online and dovetails with what has
been said about Mr. Roof thus far — that he had self-radicalized, and that he
did not belong to a particular hate group. “It’s clear that he was extremely
receptive to those ideas,” said Mark Pitcavage, the director of the
Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “At the same time, he does not
have a sophisticated knowledge of white supremacy.”
The icon for the browser tab on Mr. Roof’s website is an Othala rune, an ancient
symbol appropriated by the Nazis that remains common among neo-Nazi groups.
Mr. Roof was the latest in what watchdog groups say is a growing group of
lone-wolf extremists. According to a study released in February by the Southern
Poverty Law Center, about 70 percent of the 60 recent domestic terrorism attacks
reviewed were conducted by people acting alone.
The writings on Mr. Roof’s website show a fixation with black-on-white crime,
which is common on white supremacy sites, said Heidi Beirich, the director of
the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.
“They demonize blacks to position themselves as victims, and offer that as proof
of why they need their own state,” she said.
In one photograph posted on the website, Mr. Roof is shown posing with wax
figures of slaves. In others, he posed with a handgun that appears to be a
.45-caliber Glock. He had a .45-caliber Glock in his car when he was arrested
Thursday, the police said.
The website’s links contain several passages of long racist rants, in which he
said Hispanics are enemies, and “Negroes” have lower I.Q.s and low impulse
control. The manifesto praises segregation and says the author’s reading of
“hundreds” of slave narratives indicates that almost all slaves gave positive
accounts of their lives. The manifesto uses defamatory terms for blacks, whom he
accused of being “stupid and violent” with “the capacity to be very slick.” It
laments white flight, and suggested that the whites should instead stay behind
in cities and fight.
Criticisms are also levied at Jews, but Asians are praised for being racists and
potential allies. Mr. Brown said his friend’s transformation appeared to have
occurred after he left Columbia, S.C., for nearby Lexington. Records show he
switched schools in 2007. “He wasn’t putting on Facebook ‘I hate black people. I
am going to shoot up a church,’ ” Mr. Brown said.
Correction: June 20, 2015
An earlier version of this article described David Lane incorrectly. He was
serving a 190-year sentence when he died in 2007; he is not currently serving
the sentence.
Ashley Southall and Ken Schwencke contributed reporting from New York. Alan
Blinder contributed from Charleston, Michael Schmidt from Washington and Kate
Zernike from New Jersey.
A version of this article appears in print on June 21, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: Roof’s Photos Appear on Site With Manifesto.
AT the sprawling Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas one day
last spring, I was met by five men with earpieces who escorted me to the
pastor’s office. As I prepared to preach that morning, a rolling phalanx of
bodyguards shadowed my every move — when I greeted parishioners in the church’s
spacious narthex and even as I made a stop at the men’s room. We walked from the
church study into the 4,200-seat sanctuary, the security team whispering into
their wrists.
I was entering a sanctuary, a sacred space to speak the word of the Lord and to
lift the spirits of God’s people. But I was also entering a black church, a site
of particular power in this country, and a site of unspeakable terror.
That is what the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.,
became on Wednesday, when a young white male wielding a .45-caliber handgun
unloaded his rage on nine souls, and that is why for the foreseeable future we
will enter our houses of worship wary of violence.
Sites and spaces of black life have come under attack from racist forces before,
but the black church is a unique target. It is not just where black people
gather.
In too many other places, black self-worth is bludgeoned by bigotry or hijacked
by self-hatred: that our culture is too dumb, our lives too worthless, to
warrant the effort to combat our enemies. The black sanctuary breathes in black
humanity while the pulpit exhales unapologetic black love.
For decades, these sites of love have been magnets for hate.
In June 1958, a dynamite bomb rocked the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham,
Ala., led by the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, a civil rights luminary. It would
take more than two decades to bring the white supremacist perpetrator to
justice. In 1963, four girls were killed when the 16th Street Baptist Church in
the same city was bombed. As the drive to register black voters heated up during
Freedom Summer in 1964, nearly three dozen black churches in Mississippi were
bombed or burned.
The hatred of black sacred space didn’t end in the 1960s. In July 1993, the
F.B.I. uncovered a plot to bomb the First A.M.E. Church in Los Angeles, wipe out
its congregation with machine guns, and then assassinate Rodney G. King in hopes
of provoking a race war. In 1995, several men took sledgehammers to the pews and
kitchens of black churches in Sumter County, Ala. A year later, the Inner City
Church in Knoxville, Tenn., was bombarded with as many as 18 Molotov cocktails
as its back door was splashed with racist epithets.
President Clinton appointed a task force in 1996 to investigate church fires,
which by 1998 had singed the holy legacies of 225 black churches. In November,
2008, three white men set the Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield,
Mass., ablaze hours after Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black
president.
And this wasn’t the first time Emanuel A.M.E. Church, founded in 1816, faced
racist violence. After Denmark Vesey, one of the church’s founding members,
plotted a slave rebellion but was foiled in the effort by a slave who betrayed
his plans, Emanuel was burned to the ground by an angry white mob.
Despite this history, black churches are open and affirming of whoever seeks to
join their ranks — unlike white churches, which have often rigidly divided along
racial lines. The A.M.E. church was born when the founder Richard Allen spurned
segregation in the white Methodist church and sought to worship God free of
crippling prejudice. Early church leaders took seriously the scripture in Acts
17:26, which claims of God: “From one man he made all the nations, that they
should inhabit the whole earth,” even as they embraced the admonition in Hebrews
13:2: “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some
people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.”
That is how it is possible that the doors of Emanuel were open to a young white
participant who, after an hour of prayer, raised a weapon and took nine lives.
Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of the murdered pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney,
said one of the survivors told her that the gunman argued: “I have to do it. You
rape our women and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.” The
vortex of racist mythology spun into a plan of racial carnage.
The black church is a breeding ground for leaders and movements to quell the
siege of white racist terror. From the start, black churches sought to amplify
black grievance against racial injustice and to forge bonds with believers to
resist oppression from the broader society. The church’s spiritual and political
mission were always intertwined: to win the freedom of its people so that they
could prove their devotion to God.
Some critics see black church leaders as curators of moral quiet in the face of
withering assault. Religious people are accused of being passive in the wake of
social injustice — of seeking heavenly reward rather than earthly action. In
truth, the church at its best has nurtured theological and political resistance
to white supremacy and the forces of black hatred. The church has supplied
leaders and blueprints for emancipation — whether in the preaching of Frederick
Douglass or Prathia Hall or in the heroic activism of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr.
But the church is also the place where black people are most vulnerable. Oddly,
stereotypes of the sort the killer nursed are unmasked in such a setting. It is
not murderous venom that courses in black veins but loving tolerance for the
stranger, which is the central moral imperative of the Gospel.
I recall an instance of such generosity when I led a dialogue for a black men’s
group at another Dallas church a few years ago. A white man entered the church
and joined our group. We introduced ourselves, and welcomed him. He sought to
counter my message of affirmation for gay men and lesbians. After he had his
say, I asked him if the tables were turned could such a thing occur: Could I, as
a black man, show up at his white church and be received with open arms and
permitted to publicly denounce the teachings of the white male lecturer? He at
least had the honesty to admit it could never happen. Yet no black man asked him
to leave our ranks.
Adherence to the moral imperative to treat strangers kindly may have led to the
black parishioners’ death in Charleston. The shooter exploited the very kindness
and humanity he found before him. The black folk gathered in that church were
the proof that he was wrong; they were the living, breathing antithesis of
bigoted creeds cooked up in the racist fog he lived in. It is not their
barbarity, but the moral beauty of black people that let an angel of death hide
in their religious womb.
Its openness and magnanimity are what make the black church vital in the quest
for black self-regard. When I stand in the house of God to deliver the word I
embrace the redemption of black belief — a belief in self and community.
In a country where black death is normal, even fiendishly familiar, black love
is an unavoidably political gesture. And that is what happens in our churches:
The act of black love, which seems to make our houses of worship a target of
hate. It is a political act in this culture that must remind the nation, once
again, as hate and terror level our community, that black lives matter.
Michael Eric Dyson is a professor of sociology at Georgetown, an
ordained Baptist minister and a contributing opinion writer.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up
for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 21, 2015, on page SR5 of the
New York edition with the headline: Love and Terror in the Black Church.
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Wednesday was a busy day at the Emanuel A.M.E.
Church.
The pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, a tall, rangy man with a deep voice,
would normally have stayed in Columbia, the capital, for his job as a state
senator. But he had returned to his congregation here for an important meeting
with the presiding elder of the district. There was the matter of the church
elevator, long under construction. The budget needed review. And three
congregants were officially received as new preachers. One by one, they stepped
before the group to receive a certificate and applause.
The meeting in the church basement ended around 8 p.m., and the crowd of about
50 dwindled to 12 of the congregation’s most devout members, who would remain
for the Wednesday night Bible study.
That was when the visitor, a young white man, came to the door, asking for the
minister. It was unusual for a stranger, much less a white one, to come to the
Wednesday night session, but Bible study was open to all, and Mr. Pinckney
welcomed him. They sat together around a green table, prayed, sang and then
opened to the Gospel of Mark, 4:16-20, which likens the word of God to a seed
that must fall on good soil to bear fruit.
At about 9, gunfire and terrified cries shattered the evening calm. In the
pastor’s office, Mr. Pinckney’s wife, who had been waiting patiently with their
younger daughter, turned off the lights, locked the door, hugged her child close
and called 911.
When the shooting was over, nine congregants were dead, including Mr. Pinckney
and two of the newly ordained ministers, each shot multiple times with a
.45-caliber handgun. The stranger — identified by the police as Dylann Roof, 21,
a high school dropout and sometime landscaper — has been charged with nine
counts of murder.
“You are raping our women and taking over our country,” Mr. Roof said to the
victims, all of them black, before killing them, witnesses told the police.
In a matter of unforeseen moments, the future of the Emanuel African Methodist
Episcopal Church and its 350 active members would be changed forever. Church
leaders were lost, along with worshipers young and middle-aged. Children were
left motherless. A girls’ track team lost its coach; a university its admissions
coordinator. And residents of all races in Charleston, a city that places such
value on its houses of worship that it calls itself the Holy City, recoiled in
horror as one of its most storied buildings was desecrated by intolerant rage
and transformed, if briefly, into a charnel house.
A parishioner, Elizabeth Alston, said Saturday that the church would be open for
Sunday school and services the next morning.
The massacre has reverberated far beyond Charleston, prompting fierce new debate
about race relations in a nation already grappling with protests over police
conduct toward African-Americans.
President Obama spoke Thursday of “the heartache and the sadness and the anger”
the shootings had elicited. The Justice Department opened a hate crimes
investigation. And in Columbia, where Mr. Pinckney’s empty desk in the
Legislature has been adorned with a black cloak and flowers, lawmakers were once
again grappling with the question of whether the Confederate battle flag should
fly on the grounds of the statehouse.
But the deepest pain was at the handsome, whitewashed old church in Charleston,
now cordoned off with yellow police tape, and along the intimate tendrils that
connected its members to friends and family.
The ‘Itinerant Pastor’
Mr. Pinckney, 41, was a busy man. But when he was talking to you, said Sylvia
Johnson, 56, his cousin, he locked eyes intently and listened carefully. He was
especially tender toward Ms. Johnson’s blind daughter. His voice could move into
a more stern, but still loving, register when he addressed his own daughters,
Eliana and Malana.
With his flock in Charleston; his home in Jasper County, at South Carolina’s
southernmost tip; and his job up in Columbia, Mr. Pinckney had to work to spread
his love around. He called himself the “itinerant pastor.” He had recently run
an old car dry and bought a new SUV.
On Wednesday morning in Columbia, he was dressed, sharp as always, in a dark
suit and sitting in his office with his back to a view of the capitol dome,
preparing for a Senate Finance Committee meeting. He was surrounded by framed
newspaper spreads (“Leading From the Pulpit”; “Under 30 and on the Move”),
recognitions of achievement (Prestigious Jaguar Award, Jasper County High
School, 1991), volumes of Bibles and a poster of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr. Next to a refrigerator bearing a “Yes! I Love My Library” sticker given to
him by his wife, Jennifer, a librarian, he had rolled up a bunch of posters
depicting African-American life in the South Carolina Lowcountry. He planned to
take them home that day.
But first, another day of work. Mr. Pinckney, elected to the South Carolina
House at age 23, had always had a sense of purpose. In seventh grade, the skinny
student endured the taunts of his classmates in Jasper County, a depressed angle
of what Senate colleagues called the Forgotten Triangle, for wearing a starched
shirt and tie and for carrying a briefcase instead of a backpack. He thought you
needed to dress like someone to be someone.
He quickly became someone. He had begun preaching sermons in his teens. An
ambitious intern unafraid to ask his bosses to look at the county budget, he
became a page in the State House of Representatives and ultimately a member, and
then a senator.
Now, 12 hours before he was killed, he took the elevator down to Room 105 for
another meeting on the budget, where he again pushed, in the face of an
overwhelming Republican majority, for funding to fix the roads in his deprived
district.
Later, he rode an escalator up from the parking lot to the statehouse. He walked
between marble columns and up a mahogany staircase lined with paintings of the
Revolutionary War, and greeted friends in a lobby presided over by a statue of
John C. Calhoun. In the stately Senate chamber, he greeted more friends on the
floor and took a seat next to Senator Vincent A. Sheheen, a fellow Democrat.
It was here that Mr. Pinckney made his mark that day.
When Mr. Sheheen nervously prepared to voice his opposition to a compromise
reached with Republicans on their effort to introduce a voter ID bill, he was
shocked to hear Mr. Pinckney’s booming voice call out, “No.”
“When I heard him voting no, loud and clear, I knew I was doing the right
thing,” Mr. Sheheen said. They were the only two to vote in dissent.
Mr. Pinckney left another meeting early, telling colleagues that he had an
appointment at his church back in Charleston.
A Wild-Talking Suspect
It is not clear where or how Mr. Roof spent his Wednesday morning. Even to his
friends, there were unexplained gaps.
He had dropped out of many of his oldest friends’ lives some years ago. But
then, about a month ago, he resurfaced, telling them that he had gone to a
public library in Columbia to open a Facebook account for the express purpose of
finding them.
As a younger man, Mr. Roof had a rocky academic career, attending ninth grade
twice at two schools, but possibly not making it any further. Friends recalled
him as being painfully shy.
But recently, he had been showing a new side, his friends said: spouting racist
comments, praising segregation and talking wildly of setting off a race war. He
had also been arrested twice: once in February for possession of Suboxone, a
drug used to treat opiate addiction, and a second time in April for trespassing
at a mall where he had been banned for a year after the first arrest.
On the day Mr. Roof contacted his old friends through Facebook, he went to the
family trailer home of one of them, Joseph C. Meek Jr., in Red Bank, in suburban
Lexington County. Soon, he was sleeping there as often as four times a week,
sometimes on the floor. He had a cellphone, his friends said, but no phone
service. To communicate, he used Wi-Fi to send messages via Facebook, or he
showed up in person.
Mr. Roof told his friends that he had quit a landscaping job because he could
not bear working in the Southern heat. He spent his days loafing around the
place, watching television and sometimes calling his father, pretending to be at
work, said Jacob Meek, 15, Joseph’s brother. “He said his parents kept
pressuring him to get a job,” Jacob said.
He was fond of vodka and usually kept a stash around. He went to the Platinum
Plus strip club recently, Jacob said, and threw dollar bills at the dancers.
But amid his aimlessness, Joseph Meek, 20, and other friends said, Mr. Roof
talked wildly about hurting African-Americans, about doing something “crazy.”
Joseph, worried, hid the .45-caliber handgun Mr. Roof had bought with money his
parents gave him for his 21st birthday. But Joseph eventually returned the gun
because he was on probation and feared having it around.
At one point, Jacob said, Mr. Roof’s parents took the gun, too. “I guess he
stole it back,” he said.
On Tuesday, Mr. Roof agreed to drive his friends to Lake Murray. He said he was
pressed for time, because he wanted to make the 2 p.m. showing of “Jurassic
World” at the AMC theater. He showed Jacob the movie coupon he had in his car.
He carried a $7 pack of American Spirit cigarettes and wore a long-sleeve gray
shirt with a Border Patrol logo on one side and a sleeve stained with battery
acid. He wore that shirt all the time, Jacob said.
He was not acting jumpy or out of the ordinary, his friends recalled. He was
acting like a guy who had a movie to catch.
“He did seem like he was in a rush,” Jacob said. “He was like, ‘Come on, let’s
go.’ ”
The Massacre
The Bible study group was wrapping up when the first gunshots sounded.
The killing of nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in
Charleston, S.C., is among a long list of attacks targeting predominantly black
churches in the United States.
Felicia Sanders, who was in the room, heard the gunfire before seeing who the
gunman was, she later told a friend, Ms. Johnson, Mr. Pinckney’s cousin.
Ms. Sanders dropped to the ground with her 5-year-old granddaughter. She saw
blood everywhere. The white visitor was doing the shooting, and he reloaded his
weapon five times.
Ms. Sanders’s son, Tywanza Sanders, tried unsuccessfully to shield his aunt,
Susie Jackson, 87, and talk sense to the gunman.
“That’s when the gunman said: ‘Y’all are raping our women and taking over the
country. This must be done,’ ” Ms. Johnson recalled Ms. Sanders telling her.
Then he shot Tywanza. At one point, he asked a woman if she had been shot yet.
When she said no, he said: “Good. Someone has to live to tell the story, because
I’m going to kill myself, too.” Ms. Sanders survived only by playing dead, Ms.
Johnson said.
Soon, the gunman was gone, fleeing in his Hyundai Elantra and leaving nine
churchgoers dead or dying behind.
Mr. Sanders, 26, who recently graduated from college, had been cutting hair and
hoping to get a better job. In his final Instagram post, he quoted Jackie
Robinson: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”
Photo
Worshipers gathered to pray across the street from the church after the
shooting. Credit David Goldman/Associated Press
Then there was Ethel Lance, 70, a mother of five. She was a sexton at the church
and had worked as a custodian at Charleston’s Gaillard Center for 35 years until
her retirement.
A fan of gospel music, Ms. Lance was in charge of the backstage area there,
including the dressing rooms, a job she loved because of the procession of
performers who filed in and out. “She got a kick of that,” said Cam Patterson, a
former co-worker.
Cynthia Graham Hurd, a Charleston County librarian, had spent much of her last
day in meetings at work before going to church. One of the presentations had
been about civility, said her colleague Cynthia Bledsoe.
“She was so vocal and excited and happy about what was going on,” said Darlene
P. Jackson, the manager of the main county library. “She was happy about how we
were going to set policies to help people.”
In a 2003 feature in the local newspaper, The Post and Courier, Ms. Hurd said
marrying her husband, Steve, had been one of the greatest joys of her life. Mr.
Hurd, a merchant seaman, was making his way back from Saudi Arabia, when Ms.
Hurd was killed. Sunday would have been her 55th birthday, and Mr. Hurd had
arranged a surprise, a delivery of pizza and cake, another co-worker of Ms.
Hurd’s said.
For another victim, the Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr., 74, the church had been a
second home. He was a war veteran who rarely missed Wednesday Bible study, which
he usually led.
On this Wednesday, as the business meeting broke up and congregants began
gathering for the study group, Mr. Simmons urged Leon Alston, a steward at the
church, to join. He did that almost every week. And almost every week, Mr.
Alston declined.
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“You need to start coming to Bible study a lot more,” Mr. Simmons said.
“Maybe the next meeting,” Mr. Alston replied.
A Suspicion Confirmed
Up in Red Bank on Wednesday night, the Meek brothers heard the news about a mass
killing in Charleston. Mr. Roof immediately came to mind, Jacob said. They
waited until they saw the surveillance photos to be sure.
There was a familiar figure, wearing a recognizable Border Patrol shirt stained
in black.
They called the F.B.I. The authorities quickly arrived at the trailer and went
through Mr. Roof’s things, taking his vodka and two shirts, one that said
“Myrtle Beach” and another with a picture of the Hulk, Joseph Meek said.
The Charleston police say Mr. Roof’s father also called the authorities that
night when he saw photographs of the suspect. He told them his son owned a
.45-caliber handgun. Law enforcement officials had found .45-caliber casings at
the scene.
At home in Summerville, half an hour northwest of Charleston, Ms. Johnson
received a call Wednesday evening from Mr. Pinckney’s wife, who told her that
there had been a shooting.
“I said, ‘Where’s Clementa?’ ” Ms. Johnson recalled.
Her cousin’s wife, distraught, replied: “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Richard Fausset and John Eligon reported from Charleston, and Jason Horowitz and
Frances Robles from Columbia, S.C. Lizette Alvarez contributed reporting from
Miami. Susan Beachy contributed research.
A version of this article appears in print on June 21, 2015,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
A Hectic Day at Church, and Then a Hellish Visitor.
Faced with an online backlash, a member of the National Rifle Association’s
board deleted comments Friday criticizing the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, a South
Carolina lawmaker who was one of the nine people shot and killed in the attack
on his church in Charleston on Wednesday night.
The N.R.A. official, Charles L. Cotton, argued in an online discussion that Mr.
Pinckney, a state senator, bore some responsibility for the other deaths because
he had opposed a change to South Carolina’s gun laws that would have made it
legal to carry a concealed weapon into a church.
Writing on a forum that he administers for supporters of concealed handgun
licensing, Mr. Cotton, a lawyer in Houston, observed that Mr. Pinckney had
“voted against concealed-carry.”
“Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed
members to carry handguns in church are dead,” Mr. Cotton wrote.
Although Mr. Cotton did not explain why he deleted the comments or reply to an
interview request, Andrew Arulanandam, an N.R.A. spokesman, said in an email
that “board members do not speak for the N.R.A.”
Mr. Cotton’s comments attracted attention outside the forum after they were
copied and shared by Shannon Watts, who founded the Facebook advocacy group Moms
Demand Action for Gun Sense in America the day after a gunman killed 26 people,
including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in
2012.
Ms. Watts said in a telephone interview that Mr. Cotton had “a habit of posting
these incendiary comments and then removing them.”
She added that her group’s South Carolina chapter had worked with Mr. Pinckney
on legislation to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers.
In his remarks, Mr. Cotton appeared to be referring to a bill, supported by the
N.R.A., that would have removed bans on carrying concealed handguns into
churches, preschools and hospitals in South Carolina and that failed to make it
through the State Senate last month. It appears, however, that Mr. Pinckney did
not have the chance to vote against the measure, which was approved
overwhelmingly by the lower house of the South Carolina Legislature but was held
up in a Senate committee.
On his firm’s website, Mr. Cotton takes credit for having written a bill passed
by the Texas Legislature in 2011 that brought “sweeping protection against
frivolous lawsuits and unnecessary, politically motivated regulation targeting
sport shooting ranges.”
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A WEEK of absurdity around a confused racial con artist, and a
massacre in a black church brings us to this: Today is the 150th anniversary of
Juneteenth, when the last of the American slaves were told they were free. Now,
to put it to good use, at a time when a post-racial era seems very much out of
reach.
The first black man to live in the White House, long hesitant about doing
anything bold on the color divide, could make one of the most simple and
dramatic moves of his presidency: apologize for the land of the free being, at
one time, the largest slaveholding nation on earth.
The Confederate flag that still flies on the grounds of the Statehouse in South
Carolina, cradle of the Civil War, is a reminder that the hatred behind the
proclaimed right to own another human being has never left our shores.
An apology would not kill that hatred, but it would ripple, positively, in ways
that may be felt for years.
As the son of a Kenyan father and a white mother who died more than a century
after slavery ended, Barack Obama has little ancestral baggage on this issue.
Yet no man could make a stronger statement about America’s original sin than the
first African-American president.
Conservatives would caw — they always do — and say, get over it, don’t play the
race card. Liberals would complain that a simple apology did not go far enough,
unless it entailed reparations for the descendants of slaves. But words of
contrition — a formal acknowledgment of a grievous wrong by a great nation —
have a power all their own.
The British, the Vatican, the Germans and the South Africans have all issued
formal apologies for their official cruelties, and each case has had a
cleansing, even liberating effect. The United States Congress apologized to
African-Americans for slavery in 2009, though it came with a caveat that the mea
culpa could not be used as legal rationale for reparations.
And President Bill Clinton, while in Africa in 1998, apologized for the slave
trade, but not for a government that institutionalized white supremacy during
its first four score and change.
For this year’s Juneteenth — commemorating the day in 1865, more than two years
after the Emancipation Proclamation, when a Union general landed in Galveston,
Tex., and told the last of the dead-enders in Texas that “all slaves are free” —
President Obama could close a loop in a terrible history. He could also elevate
the current discussion on race, which swirled earlier this week around the
serial liar Rachel Dolezal, and the race-baiting billionaire vanity blimp of
Donald Trump.
The slaughter of worshipers in a church with long ties to fighting slavery and
Jim Crow “raises questions about a dark part of our history,” President Obama
said Thursday. Questions about why South Carolina can still fly the flag of a
traitor nation, a flag apparently embraced by the shooter. Questions rooted in a
history that calls for a formal apology.
From the time the first Africans arrived as slaves in Jamestown in 1619 through
the codification of blacks as three-fifths of a person in the Constitution and
up to the eve of the Civil War, when four million people were held in bondage,
slavery has been the most incongruent element of a people proclaiming to be
enlightened.
Lincoln said he hated “the monstrous injustice of slavery,” in part because it
allowed “enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as
hypocrites.”
Countries, religions and corporations sometimes do awful things in their names.
It doesn’t diminish them to note their failures, their injustices, their crimes
against humanity. It elevates them.
When Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain apologized to the Irish in 1997 for
England’s role in a famine that killed more than a million people, it opened the
door to reconciliation, and a burst of new scholarship and awareness about a
genocidal episode long mired in shame.
The British government also tried to make good for prosecuting a World War II
hero and Nazi code breaker, Alan Turing, for the crime of being gay.
It took the Vatican 350 years to apologize for the persecution of the Italian
astronomer Galileo. But now the church speaks with authority, backed by science,
on climate change — leaving Republicans in the United States in the dungeon of
ignorance.
Pope John Paul II apologized to Jews for the Vatican’s inaction on the Holocaust
and to Muslims killed by crusaders. Last year, Pope Francis reached out to
victims of clerical sex abuse and said he was sorry on behalf of the church he
leads.
President Ronald Reagan signed legislation that provided payments and apologies
for the internment, during World War II, of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans
— most of them United States citizens.
It’s harder to be contrite than to conquer. Obama had nothing to do with
slavery. Most Americans, descendants of immigrants shunned in their homelands,
have very little connection to the slaveholders of the American South. So why
apologize? Because we own this past. As such, we have to condemn it.
Gail Collins and Joe Nocera are off today.
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for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 20, 2015, on page A19 of the
New York edition with the headline: Apology for Slavery.
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Stunned by the massacre at Emanuel African
Methodist Episcopal Church, South Carolina has been abruptly forced to confront
an issue that has bedeviled it for decades: the Confederate battle flag that
flies above the grounds of the State House.
The tension was on display Friday, while the American and South Carolina flags
flew at half-staff and the Confederate battle flag remained at the peak of its
pole outside the State House in Columbia and the N.A.A.C.P. renewed its demand
that the Civil War standard be permanently removed.
“That symbol has to come down,” Cornell William Brooks, the national president
of the N.A.A.C.P., said at a news conference here, calling it an emblem of hate.
“That symbol must be removed from our state capital.”
Lawmakers in both parties said that despite public frustration and anger, a
provision of state law prevents officials from lowering the Confederate flag to
half-staff. That anger unspooled on social media, where pictures of the flag
were repeatedly posted and denounced.
Some lawmakers said the discussion could lead to a reconsideration of the flag’s
placement.
“I think it’s a conversation that we’re going to have,” said State Senator Tom
Davis, a Republican who represents Beaufort County in the Legislature. But he
added: “Nothing is going to happen simply within the walls of that chamber
without the people making their voice heard. There’s a sense in the institution
itself that this issue was resolved.”
For years, the flag flew above the State House dome. In 2000, state officials,
pressured by a business boycott led by the N.A.A.C.P. and large protests in
Columbia, decided that only the American and South Carolina flags would fly
above the State House, while the Confederate battle flag would be placed in
front of the building.
This week, after the killings of nine people at a Bible study class at the
Emanuel church, Gov. Nikki R. Haley ordered the American and South Carolina
flags lowered for nine days — one day for each of the victims — but could do
nothing about the height of the Confederate standard.
South Carolina law gives only the Legislature power to make changes to the
Confederate battle flag display, and they must be approved by supermajorities in
both the House and the Senate.
After years of being thwarted, opponents of flying the Confederate battle flag
said this time there may be enough public outcry and rage to compel legislative
action.
“I think that what we’ve seen in South Carolina is another act of terrorism, and
this act of terrorism reminds us of a history of terrorism enacted against
African-American people, particularly in the South,” said Russell Moore, a
descendant of Confederate veterans who heads the public policy arm of the
Southern Baptist Convention. “I think there’s momentum now to say we’re going to
do everything we can to love each other and to work together, and that means
getting rid of images of division. I do think the flag will come down.”
But even as Mr. Moore expressed confidence and lawmakers discussed plans to file
legislation seeking to remove the flag from the State House’s grounds, many
others cautioned that any shift in policy faced difficult odds in the
Legislature.
“It’s a total lose-lose issue,” said David Woodard, a political science
professor at Clemson University and a longtime Republican consultant. “You’re
not going to make any friends by doing it, so you just leave it be.”
He added: “That’s a sad thing, but that’s the way it will have to be because I
don’t see anyone who’s willing to take it on. There’s no politician who’s
powerful enough to take it on.”
That included, he said, Ms. Haley, who told CBS on Friday that she expected a
new round of debate in Columbia, the capital.
“I think that conversation will probably come back up again,” the governor said.
“What we hope is that we do things the way South Carolinians do, which is have
the conversation, allow some thoughtful words to be exchanged, be kind about it,
come together on what we’re trying to achieve and how we’re trying to do it. I
think the state will start talking about that again, and we’ll see where it
goes.”
Senator Lindsey Graham told CNN that he would support a move to “revisit” the
flag’s status, but he added that the flag was part of the state’s identity.
A Winthrop University poll last fall found that 62 percent of South Carolina
residents had positive or neutral feelings toward the flag. But the poll’s
director, Scott H. Huffmon, said Friday that he expected to see the results
change in the future.
“Most people, based on past numbers, just want to put it behind them,” Dr.
Huffmon said. “But given what has happened this week, I think people that are
completely O.K. with the flag would likely — and I have no data to prove this —
be O.K. with taking it down given the impact it has on others.”
Supporters of the Confederate battle flag display signaled Friday that their
position had not changed. In a commentary on Friday, Michael Hill, the president
of the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has listed as
a hate group, said that the Confederate battle flag should remain at the State
House but that the American flag should be removed.
The American flag, Mr. Hill wrote, “now stands for multiculturalism, tolerance
and diversity — the left’s unholy trinity.” In “sharp contrast,” he wrote, the
Confederate battle flag “stands for the heroic effort our people made 150 years
ago to avoid the fate” of contemporary America.
Other supporters of the flag said they view the two issues — the mass shooting
and the flag — as unrelated. Dan Coleman, a spokesman for the Georgia division
of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said the attack had more to do with “one
very troubled young man” than the flag.
“It’s a shame that those people were killed, and we all greatly regret that
incident, and we were upset that anybody would try to tie people who are proud
of their heritage to an act like that,” he said.
Still, in Charleston, much of the talk was about change, even if it was unclear
whether the conversations would bring it about.
“Surely, this is the time that that discussion needs to be had and had at a much
higher octave than it’s been done in many years,” Dot Scott, the president of
the Charleston chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. said before Mr. Brooks spoke here.
“There’s been a renewed time and an opportunity to have that discussion. I don’t
have to guess about it because of the number of calls I’ve already gotten about
it.”
Alan Blinder reported from Charleston, and Manny Fernandez from Houston. Richard
Pérez-Peña contributed reporting from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on June 20, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: Outrage vs. Tradition, Wrapped in a
High-Flying Flag of Dixie.
The horrific church shooting in Charleston, S.C., leaves the
nation at an all too familiar juncture — uncertain whether to do something
positive to repair society’s vulnerabilities or to once again absorb an
intolerable wound by going through what has become a woeful ritual of deep grief
followed by shallow resolve to move on toward … what? Toward the inevitable
carnage next time.
The factors emerging in the mass murder of the nine churchgoers, who took the
shooter into their prayerful midst, are a confluence of some of the nation’s
most glaring problems: the empowerment of a steady stream of enraged people
exercising their easy right to bear arms; the odious racism that haunts
society’s darkest corners; and the public’s general sense of impotence, as
needed solutions are left up to a political system undermined by retrograde and
timorous officials more interested in their own survival than in the broader
welfare.
The details emerging on how the suspected shooter might have been inspired by
the white supremacy movement are another warning that the nation’s long history
of racial brutality is far from healed. How much black lives matter was the
question posed during the recent police shootings of African-Americans. This
question is posed anew, in most grotesque fashion, in Charleston. Honest and
creative answers are possible, but only if the American people — white and black
— are galvanized to force politicians to make tangible improvements that go
beyond vigils and speeches.
Anyone who has been to modern, progressive Charleston would be struck by a visit
to its old slave market. This museum, which recounts historic abuses from a time
when black people were chained as chattel, rings with the truth of how elusive
full racial accord remains in America. The state’s nostalgic but poisonous
flaunting of Confederate flags from a war that was waged over the issue of human
bondage adds insult to the historic injuries still felt.
Perversely but tellingly, while other flags at the state Capitol in Columbia
were lowered to half-staff in mourning for the shooting victims, the Confederate
flag remained at full staff, reportedly under the sole control of state
legislators. Many of them, of course, make a staunch defense of that flag part
of their election campaigns.
Of all the factors at the heart of the church massacre, the issue of easy access
to guns should be the most amenable to reform. President Obama pointed out how
our nation remains shamefully exceptional among modern nations, racking up tens
of thousands of gun deaths a year. “Once again, innocent people were killed in
part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their
hands on a gun,” he said.
The laws of the land enable this continuing national tragedy. Congress issued a
bitter lesson to the president when it rejected his proposals for greater gun
safety after the 2012 massacre of 20 schoolchildren in Connecticut. Mr. Obama
should marshal full political force in reviving the demand for action by
Congress — a point the public strongly supports, even though Congress continues
to be enslaved to the desires of the gun lobby.
In this moment of grief, there’s a measure of practical comfort to be taken from
the warning of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “We must live together as
brothers or perish together as fools.” It’s increasingly clear that King
understood and embodied the sufferings of not just African-Americans but an
entire nation still haunted by racism and mindless violence.
Beyond this latest grief, however, he epitomized unyielding dedication to
political progress. “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability,” he
cautioned, “but comes through continuous struggle.” This remains the nation’s
only course after the horrendous murders in Charleston.
A version of this editorial appears in print on June 20, 2015, on page A18 of
the New York edition with the headline: Beyond Mourning for Charleston.
CHARLESTON, S.C. — One by one, they looked to the screen in a
corner of the courtroom on Friday, into the expressionless face of the young man
charged with making them motherless, snuffing out the life of a promising son,
taking away a loving wife for good, bringing a grandmother’s life to a horrific
end. And they answered him with forgiveness.
“You took something very precious away from me,” said Nadine Collier, daughter
of 70-year-old Ethel Lance, her voice rising in anguish. “I will never talk to
her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you. And
have mercy on your soul.”
The occasion was a bond hearing, the first court appearance of the suspect,
Dylann Roof, for the murders, thought to be racially motivated, of nine black
men and women during Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church
on Wednesday night.
It was as if the Bible study had never ended as one after another, victims’
family members offered lessons in forgiveness, testaments to a faith that is not
compromised by violence or grief. They urged him to repent, confess his sins and
turn to God.
“We welcomed you Wednesday night in our Bible study with open arms,” said
Felicia Sanders, the mother of 26-year old Tywanza Sanders, a poet who died
after trying to save his aunt, who was also killed.
“You have killed some of the most beautifulest people that I know,” she said in
a quavering voice. “Every fiber in my body hurts, and I will never be the same.
Tywanza Sanders is my son, but Tywanza was my hero. Tywanza was my hero. But as
we say in Bible study, we enjoyed you. But may God have mercy on you.”
The statements offered a moment of grace in a day when new details emerged about
a massacre that has stunned the nation, echoing a long history of racial
violence.
“All the victims were hit multiple times,” the Charleston Police Department
wrote in an arrest warrant released Friday. The gunman walked in wearing a fanny
pack, the statement said, and sat with the group talking Scripture for nearly an
hour before he drew a gun and began firing — and on his way out, stood over a
surviving witness “and uttered a racially inflammatory statement.”
After the police released security camera images of the suspect outside the
church, Mr. Roof’s father and an uncle contacted the Charleston police and
positively identified the defendant and his vehicle as those they saw in the
photographs, the warrant revealed.
“Defendant’s father told investigators that his son owns a .45-caliber handgun,”
the warrant said, the same caliber shell casings that the police had recovered
from the church floor.
Mr. Roof, 21, who is white, was charged Friday with nine counts of murder,
punishable by death, and one count of criminal possession of a firearm during
the commission of a violent crime. Law enforcement officials said that after he
was arrested on Thursday in Shelby, N.C., he told investigators he had just done
something big in Charleston, and the pistol believed to have been used in the
shooting was recovered from his car.
Joseph Meek, a friend of Mr. Roof’s, said that his parents each gave him $350
toward the purchase of the gun, which he bought this spring, and that at some
point they took it away from him. There have been reports that his parents gave
him the gun directly, as a 21st birthday present, but Mr. Meek said Mr. Roof
made a point of buying it himself so that his parents would not be implicated in
any trouble he might get into.
Friends said Mr. Roof voiced virulently racist views and had talked recently
about starting a new civil war — even about shooting black people. Photographs
of him wearing patches with the flags of the former white supremacist
governments of South Africa and Rhodesia, and leaning against a car with
Confederate States of America on its license plate, drew millions of views
online.
Gov. Nikki R. Haley, a Republican, was one of many officials to label the
shootings a hate crime, and called for the death penalty in the case.
President Obama, who on Thursday lamented the poor prospects for new gun
control, said Friday that his words had been misinterpreted as resignation that
nothing would change, and renewed his call for legislation.
“Every country has hateful or mentally unstable people,” Mr. Obama said at a
United States Conference of Mayors meeting in San Francisco. “What’s different
is that not every country is awash with easily accessible guns. So I refuse to
act as if this is the new normal. Or to pretend that it is sufficient to grieve,
or as if any attempt to act is politicizing the problem.”
The Justice Department, which was already looking into the possibility of a hate
crime prosecution, said Friday that it had not ruled out the possibility of
calling the case an act of domestic terrorism.
To Cornell William Brooks, the N.A.A.C.P. president, who spoke in Charleston,
there was no doubt. “This was an act of racial terrorism,” he said, adding that
the police and prosecutors should determine whether Mr. Roof had ties to any
hate groups.
But if the gunman set out to stir up hostility between races, Charleston was
having none of it, and the families appearing in court helped set a tone of
unity.
Deborah Dills, a motorist on her way to work on Thursday, called in the tip that
led the police to Dylann Roof, who is accused of killing nine people at a church
in Charleston, S.C. By Reuters on Publish Date June 19, 2015. Photo by Reuters.
“I acknowledge that I am very angry,” said Bethane Middleton-Brown, sister of
one of the victims, DePayne Middleton-Doctor. But “she taught me that we are the
family that love built. We have no room for hating.”
Laws in South Carolina and other states allow victim statements in certain
criminal court proceedings, a product of the victims’ rights movement of recent
decades. But it is unusual for that right to be invoked in something as mundane
as a bail hearing, and the words spoken Friday by the survivors were rarer
still.
Thousands of Charleston residents filled the TD Arena at the College of
Charleston for an interfaith evening prayer vigil, suffused with expressions of
Christian faith, the history of slavery and civil rights in the city and the
state, and a collective resolve.
The crowd was a multicultural mix of residents that included families with small
children and older people using canes.
“We all have one thing in common. Our hearts are broken,” said Mayor Joseph
Riley Jr., who received a standing ovation when another speaker recalled his
protest to remove the Confederate battle flag from the state capitol grounds in
Columbia.
Mr. Riley told people in the crowd — each holding a single rose given to them as
they entered the arena — that if “that young man thought he was going to divide
this community or divide this country with his racial hatred, we are here today
and all across America to resoundingly say he measurably failed.”
The Rev. Nelson B. Rivers III of the National Action Network seemed to set a
more defiant tone at the end of the program.
“I’m maladjusted,” he said. “I never got used to being disrespected. I never got
used to being mistreated,” he said as the crowd roared so loud that he could
hardly be heard.
But the evening was also about the families of the victims, who were asked to
stand and receive applause from the audience. Mr. Riley announced that funds
were pouring in to help families with funerals, for maintenance of the historic
Emanuel A.M.E. Church and to help low-income people living in South Carolina’s
Lowcountry region.
Smaller expressions of grief, both organized and impromptu, played out across
the city.
In court on Friday, Magistrate Judge James B. Gosnell Jr. set Mr. Roof’s bail at
$1 million on the gun charge, but explained that he did not have the authority
to set bail on the murder charges, which would be handled by the state’s Circuit
Court. The defendant watched impassively on a video link from a nearby jail.
The judge drew mixed reactions for another statement from the bench when he
stated that Mr. Roof’s family were also victims in the case. The family released
a statement Friday saying, “Words cannot express our shock, grief, and disbelief
as to what happened that night,” but gave no insight into the defendant’s state
of mind or racial views.
Witnesses said the gunman specifically asked for the church’s well-known pastor,
the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, who was also a state senator, and sat next to him
in the Bible study. First he listened, they said, then he argued, and eventually
he began ranting against black people, until finally, he stood, drew a gun and
fired, reloading as many as five times.
He fatally shot six women and three men, ranging in age from 26 to 87. Among the
dead was Mr. Pinckney.
Mr. Roof had an unsettled personal life — he had been arrested twice this year,
and friends said he sometimes slept in his car — and a recent history of
antiblack views. But law enforcement officials said he was not on their radar as
someone who posed a serious threat of violence.
“This is an absolute hate crime,” Ms. Haley said on Friday on NBC’s “Today”
show. “We absolutely will want him to have the death penalty. This is the worst
hate that I’ve seen and that the country has seen in a long time.”
At Emanuel A.M.E., on Calhoun Street, scores of bouquets rested on the sidewalk
on Friday, along with wreaths and a simple wooden cross. Gold, silver and white
balloons were tied to the church’s ironwork; nearby, nine white ribbons, each
bearing the name of a victim, were tied to a fence.
In downtown Charleston, there was talk of the long-term anxiety the shooting
might stir.
“The question that I have is, is it going to happen again?” said Jeremy Dye, 35,
a taxi driver and security guard from North Charleston who said he knew three of
the nine victims of Wednesday’s shootings. “It’s always going to be fear. People
in Charleston are going to have that fear now forever. It’s not going to wash
away. They’re going to be worried about, ‘O.K., when’s the next church going to
get hit?’ ”
Mr. Riley said Friday that the arrest of Mr. Roof was crucial to helping the
city heal, though he pointedly avoided using his name.
“We are in a period of loving and healing for all of those who have been so
terribly injured,” Mr. Riley said, adding that it was time for a dialogue about
race in America.
“We in America were not taught African-American history,” he said. “It was never
in the history books, and we don’t know the story.”
Nikita Stewart reported from Charleston, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York.
Alan Blinder and Frances Robles contributed reporting from Charleston, Campbell
Robertson from Shreveport, La., Michael S. Schmidt from Washington, and Erik
Eckholm from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on June 20, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: ‘I Will Never Be Able to Hold Her Again. But
I Forgive You.’.
I have no doubt that had the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney lived, he
would have become known — and celebrated — across our country for his
leadership, rather than sealed immortally in tragedy, one more black martyr in a
line stretching back to the more than 800 slave voyages that ended at Charleston
Harbor.
I know this because I filmed a long interview with Mr. Pinckney — who was killed
in his church in Charleston, S.C., along with eight congregants on Wednesday
evening — for a PBS documentary series three years ago. It was clear that there
was a reason this young man had been called to preach at 13, to minister at 18,
to serve in the State Legislature at 23, and to shepherd one of America’s most
historic black churches at 26, reminding us of other prodigies — and martyrs —
for whom the Good Book has served as a bedrock of public service. He was 41 when
he died.
It was Oct. 26, 2012, shortly before the last presidential election, and I was
talking to Mr. Pinckney and to State Representative Kenneth F. Hodges about
Robert Smalls, a slave who, at the height of the Civil War, commandeered a
Confederate ship to sail to freedom beyond Charleston Harbor and ended up
returning home to serve in the State Legislature during Reconstruction —
representing the very area these two men now served.
“I think about what it must have felt like to be a young black man in America”
back then, Mr. Pinckney told me, “to see the state and the country go through
tremendous change and to have an opportunity to make a difference in the lives
of everybody.” He added that if Smalls, an escaped slave, could make
“substantial, systematic changes,” then “I have the same kind of responsibility
to work to make a difference.”
Mr. Pinckney paused to clarify his words.
“Now, well, do I say I’m Smalls?” he said. “No, because there’s only one,
there’s only been one Robert Smalls. But I think, as being a House member who
served in the old Beaufort district that he used to serve in and a state senator
that serves that same area, I think I ought to give it my absolute best to try
to make a difference with the lives of the people I represent and the people of
South Carolina, whether it be in supporting public education, supporting our
troops, or wanting to see all people do well in South Carolina.”
All of these things, this quietly impressive man did, and did nobly.
What makes rereading the transcript of our interview so poignant for me today is
the reminder that, for one still so young, Mr. Pinckney was deeply aware of the
history he carried within himself, a history of the courageous and the slain, of
the triumphant and the terrorized. He was fluent in the lives and careers of
brave black people who had served state and church since the Civil War. He was
acutely conscious of the missed opportunities of Reconstruction, of the
contradictions that could have been settled, of the innocent lives that could
have been spared, a century before the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, had
Americans following the Civil War only been willing to put racial healing and
equal economic opportunity first.
The “unfinished work” of America — to quote Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address —
didn’t prevent him from loving the South and his country, and feeling a claim to
its blessings. “I think it really says that America is changing,” he said of
President Obama’s election, “and I think it signals to the world that the
American dream is still alive and well.”
Today, our interview seems so long ago. I asked him that day if we were still
fighting the Civil War in South Carolina. He answered: “I think South Carolina
has — and across the South we have — a deep appreciation of history. We haven’t
always had a deep appreciation of each other’s histories. We have, you know,
many reenactments across the state and sometimes in our General Assembly I feel
that we’re fighting some of the old battles.”
When no action was taken after the Newtown murders, I lost all hope for gun
control in this country.
To know him, even over the course of an autumn Carolina afternoon, was to know a
man who cherished the values on which our republic was founded, and who held an
abiding faith that the great promise of America could, one day, be fulfilled. He
was a unifier who, this past spring, taught us how to mourn in communion with
one another, following the police slaying of Walter L. Scott, a black man, just
north of his city. I don’t believe that he had the capacity to imagine the depth
of malice and anger that came down on his congregation, Emanuel African
Methodist Episcopal Church, on Wednesday night.
Though the Confederate flag still waves above the Statehouse where Mr. Pinckney
worked, a monument to the African-American freedom struggle stands nearby, a
monument of which he told me he was proud. It is that legacy that will prevail.
“Why does black political participation matter so much?” I asked him.
“We need to be a part, if we want a say in our own life, if we want to be
independent, if we want to influence what’s happening around us,” he replied.
“Or the reverse is to let everybody else control and influence and then we just
sort of take whatever comes. That’s what slaves did. But, you know, we’re not
slaves. We’re Americans, so we have a responsibility to look at ourselves —
self-help, if you will. I also think that we have a historic legacy that we need
to uphold.”
Citing the proverbial “Grandmother’s Prayer,” he said: “Lord, let me be free. If
not me, my children. If not my children, my children’s children.” He added: “We
don’t have that privilege to say our vote doesn’t count because history tells us
different.”
In parting, Mr. Pinckney told me he would be praying for President Obama on
Election Day. Sadly, today, it was Mr. Obama who found himself praying for Mr.
Pinckney. May we all pray for the soul of Clementa Pinckney, and pray that his
children and their children, all our children, be free of the curse of violence.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for
African and African American Research at Harvard University.
WASHINGTON — The shooting massacre of a black pastor and his
parishioners at a South Carolina church on Wednesday night once again confronted
President Obama with a moment of racial turmoil in a country that for all its
progress has yet to completely shed the burden of hatred and division.
After a series of police shootings, protests and riots, this latest eruption of
violence reflected a country on edge and a president struggling to pull the
American people together. Any hopes of what supporters once called a
“postracial” era now seem fanciful as Mr. Obama’s second term increasingly
focuses on what he termed “a dark part of our history.”
In a pattern that has become achingly familiar to him and the nation, Mr. Obama
on Thursday entered the White House briefing room to issue a statement of
mourning and grief as he called on the country to unify in the face of tragedy.
This time, though, the ritual was made all the more poignant because Mr. Obama
knew the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, the pastor slain at Emanuel African
Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., as well as other members of the
congregation.
The president spoke on Thursday about the church shooting in Charleston, S.C.,
and expressed his “deep sorrow over the senseless murders that took place”
Wednesday night. By AP on Publish Date June 18, 2015. Photo by Doug Mills/The
New York Times.
“This is not the first time that black churches have been attacked, and we know
that hatred across races and faiths pose a particular threat to our democracy
and our ideals,” Mr. Obama said. “The good news is I am confident that the
outpouring of unity and strength and fellowship and love across Charleston today
from all races, from all faiths, from all places of worship indicates the degree
to which those old vestiges of hatred can be overcome.”
If those words of optimism were belied by his own grim face and subdued tone,
perhaps it reflected a certain weariness or frustration over the limits of his
ability to change the nation he leads. He grew especially pointed when he noted
that this was the latest in a spate of mass shootings, and lamented what he
called the easy access to guns, an issue he has tried and failed to address with
legislation.
“At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type
of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries,” Mr. Obama said.
He added: “It is in our power to do something about it. I say that recognizing
the politics in this town foreclose a lot of the avenues right now. But it would
be wrong for us not to acknowledge it. And at some point it’s going to be
important for the American people to come to grips with it.”
To many, including the president, the shootings echoed the bombing of the 16th
Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 that killed four young black
girls. Mr. Obama quoted extensively from the eulogy delivered then by the Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
In that speech, Dr. King expressed hope that the tragedy would “transform the
negative extremes of a dark past into the positive extremes of a bright future.”
Mr. Obama’s election seemed to promise a brighter future in race relations, but
events of recent years appear to mock that hope. The 1963 bombing reflected a
broad campaign of white resistance to civil rights, and this week’s shootings
represented a violent fringe condemned by whites and blacks alike. Yet
Charleston now joins Ferguson, Mo., Staten Island and Baltimore in putting the
nation’s unfinished business back on the agenda.
By virtue of his own background, Mr. Obama has addressed these episodes with a
personal perspective none of his predecessors in the White House ever could. But
easy solutions elude him, just as they did them. Even his responses have
generated criticism on cable television and talk radio from those saying his
rhetoric itself has been divisive, fanning the flames of the racial divide by
blaming the police or white America.
“Part of what I take from this is on the one hand the realization that this
struggle still continues and despite profound change there is still profound
hatred,” said Lonnie G. Bunch, the founding director of the National Museum of
African-American History and Culture, set to open in Washington next year. “It
is a fundamentally different country. It’s a country that has changed in ways
that are amazing. But it is still a country that is torn apart by race.”
Mr. Obama has spent much of the final years of his administration addressing
race in a more expansive way than he did in his first term, because of stark
events as well as because of the anniversaries of important moments in the civil
rights movement. He has started an initiative called My Brother’s Keeper to help
young Latino and African-American men, and advanced policies in education,
criminal justice and economics that are devised in part to address the racial
divide.
Yet in the end, he has run into the same limitations that other presidents have
encountered. “The president has the power of the bully pulpit but his authority
to affect change is very limited, at least on his own,” said Judith A. Winston,
who was the executive director of former President Bill Clinton’s race
initiative in the late 1990s.
The challenge, Ms. Winston said, is even more complex for Mr. Obama than it was
for Mr. Clinton. “He’s in a very difficult position politically,” she said. “My
sense is there’s been not much conversation or policy action that’s been
explicitly directed at racial bias because of concerns that it would be seen as
favoring people of his own race.”
Joshua DuBois, a former director of faith-based initiatives in Mr. Obama’s White
House, said the president could not change deeply embedded attitudes by himself.
“Hopefully most reasonable folks in the country are clear that he is doing all
that is within his power to address issues of race in this country,” Mr. DuBois
said. “But at the same time, he does not have a magic wand to fix issues that
have been lying dormant and unaddressed for a long time.”
The shootings in Charleston hit close to home in the White House, where Mr.
Pinckney, a state senator, was known. Mr. Obama immediately recognized the name
when he was informed about the victims. “They met and formed a bond back in 2007
when they were campaigning early on in the president’s effort to get to the
White House,” said Eric Schultz, a White House spokesman. “And that bond was
strong enough to endure all the way until today.”
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who appeared with Mr. Obama in the White
House briefing room, said later that he last saw Mr. Pinckney less than a year
ago at a prayer breakfast in South Carolina. “He was a good man, a man of faith,
a man of service,” Mr. Biden said in a written statement.
In Mr. Obama’s televised remarks, he noted the long history of the Charleston
church. “Mother Emanuel church and its congregation have risen before — from
flames, from an earthquake, from other dark times — to give hope to generations
of Charlestonians,” Mr. Obama said. “And with our prayers and our love, and the
buoyancy of hope, it will rise again now as a place of peace.”
A version of this article appears in print on June 19, 2015, on page A18 of the
New York edition with the headline: A Sense at the White House of Horror, Loss
and Resolve.
The massacre of nine African-Americans in Charleston has been
classified as a possible hate crime, apparently carried out by a 21-year-old
white man who once wore an apartheid badge and other symbols of white supremacy.
But many civil rights advocates are asking why the attack has not officially
been called terrorism.
Against the backdrop of rising worries about violent Muslim extremism in the
United States, advocates see hypocrisy in the way the attack and the man under
arrest in the shooting have been described by law enforcement officials and the
news media.
Assaults like the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 and the attack on an
anti-Islamic gathering in Garland, Tex., last month have been widely portrayed
as acts of terrorism carried out by Islamic extremists. Critics say, however,
that assaults against African-Americans and Muslim Americans are rarely if ever
called terrorism.
Moreover, they argue, assailants who are white are far less likely to be
described by the authorities as terrorists.
“We have been conditioned to accept that if the violence is committed by a
Muslim, then it is terrorism,” Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on
American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights advocacy group in Washington, said
Thursday in a telephone interview.
“If the same violence is committed by a white supremacist or apartheid
sympathizer and is not a Muslim, we start to look for excuses — he might be
insane, maybe he was pushed too hard,” Mr. Awad said.
Dean Obeidallah, a Muslim American radio show host and commentator, said it
should be obvious that the Charleston killer was a terrorist.
“We have a man who intentionally went to a black church, had animus toward black
people and assassinated an elected official and eight other people,” he said.
“It seems he was motivated by a desire to terrorize and kill black people.”
While Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and South Carolina officials said the
shooting on Wednesday night was under investigation as a hate crime, much of the
reaction on social media Thursday was caustic, with commentators saying they saw
a double standard in such terminology.
“A white supremacist massacres 9 black people in Charleston. It is a hate crime,
it is terrorism, it is America 2015,” Remi Kanazi, a Palestinian-American
activist and poet, said on Twitter.
Samuel Sinyangwe, a civil rights activist who has helped chronicle violence
against African-Americans, wrote on Twitter: “#CharlestonShooting terrorist wore
an Apartheid flag on his jacket. If a Muslim man wore an ISIS flag, he wouldn’t
get past mall security.”
The definition of terrorism is a shifting and contentious subject, usually with
political overtones. The antagonists in the Syrian war and the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, routinely accuse each other of
terrorism. Militant organizations such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, which
consider themselves liberators, are officially regarded by the United Nations,
among others, as terrorist groups.
Webster’s New World College Dictionary defines terrorism as “the use of force or
threats to demoralize, intimidate and subjugate, especially such use as a
political weapon or policy.”
Civil rights advocates said the Charleston attack not only fit the dictionary
definition of terrorism but reflected a history of attempts by the Ku Klux Klan
and other white supremacist groups to terrorize African-Americans.
“The first antiterrorism law in U.S. history was the Klan Control Act, so
really, this has been the definition of terrorism,” William Jelani Cobb, a
writer and director of the Africana Studies Institute at the University of
Connecticut, said in a Twitter post.
Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, a venerable
civil rights group, said the Charleston massacre looked like terrorism to him.
“While the terrorist label is often applied to attacks, plots and conspiracies
carried out on behalf of designated terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al
Qaeda, politically motivated violence is not the sole domain of supporters of
designated terrorist groups,” Mr. Foxman said in a statement.
Karen Zraick and Robert Mackey contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on June 19, 2015, on page A18 of the
New York edition with the headline: Many Ask, Why Not Call It Terrorism?
CHARLESTON, S.C. — ON Wednesday night, while my son watched TV, I
logged on to Facebook to check my friends’ updates. Immediately I saw a post
about a shooting at Emanuel A.M.E., a historic black church in downtown
Charleston that is a stone’s throw from my office at the College of Charleston.
I made my son turn from his show to the news coverage. We stayed up and
discussed what had happened. I prayed that I didn’t know anyone who had died,
but I did.
Today Charleston, nicknamed the Holy City, is in mourning. We are still dealing
with last month’s shooting of an unarmed black man in a northern suburb, and in
the hours since this latest shooting, many of us in the African-American
community were left asking: Is there any sanctuary left?
Five years ago, my ex-husband and I jumped at the chance to leave the violence
of Chicago’s South Side to forge a life in a safer, culturally rich community.
In hopes of a better life, we eagerly joined the numbers of other
African-Americans “returning” south in a wave of reverse migration.
And for a while things were good. But then Trayvon Martin was gunned down in
Florida, and almost instantly black people seemed to be under attack. Then came
the police shootings of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Walter Scott — just a few
miles away, in North Charleston — revealing the threat of violence we face every
day. And this month we saw the footage of teenagers being manhandled by the
police in Texas and Ohio.
Churches have historically provided a bulwark against such violence, especially
here in the Deep South. From the “hush harbors” where enslaved Africans would
steal away to worship, to the spirited praise houses that were once the
spiritual cornerstone of Charleston’s Gullah community, to the hidden
passageways on the Underground Railroad, to the church basements that doubled as
strategic operation centers during the civil rights movement, the black church
has always been the one place where we most often felt protected and nurtured.
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church played all those roles in Charleston.
From my office every day I see people coming in and out, not just to pray but to
organize, to support the community. Called the Mother Church, it was founded in
1816 and was an important site in black Charleston’s struggle for liberation.
Yet even this church couldn’t provide sanctuary from hate.
On Wednesday, Mother Emanuel lost its leader, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, and
eight of its members. Not since the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in
Birmingham, Ala., almost 52 years ago, which left four little girls dead, have
we experienced such pain and loss on this level at one of our churches.
I can’t help but think of this senseless act of terror, the largest mass
shooting in the country since 2013, within the historical context of the
Birmingham bombing, but also within the very current context of the increasing
terror we African-Americans face on a daily basis.
The shooter’s reported words to his victims reflect a deep-seated hatred for,
and fear of, black people by many Americans. These vitriolic sentiments
underscore the way we are stereotyped in the media, demonized and dehumanized by
right-wing pundits, policed by law enforcement and terrorized by those who use
Stand Your Ground to cut us down without a second thought.
For me, last night’s events signal several visceral truths. One, that we
African-Americans have no sanctuary. Charleston is a wonderful city, but in some
very real ways, my children are no safer here than they were in Chicago.
This daily threat of terror does not exist within a vacuum. It looms within the
growing prison-industrial state, against the backdrop of school-reform debates,
our slow movement toward gun reform and the political maneuvers by Republicans
to make it increasingly more difficult for poor people and minorities to vote.
The reality that our civil rights are under attack is just as heavy as our fear
for our lives.
I didn’t go to the office yesterday, nor did many of my friends. Instead we
talked, in person and online, about what comes next. We must, of course, honor
the spirits of Clementa Pinckney and of my friend Cynthia Hurd, a veteran
librarian who loved books and encouraged all children to read, and of the seven
other victims.
We must also resist the comfortable fiction that, whatever racial turmoil exists
elsewhere, genteel Charleston is a place of calm. The killing of Walter Scott
showed otherwise; Wednesday’s mass murder must spur us to action. We must do
more than acknowledge the fact that, for all our legal advances, I can walk into
any number of Charleston’s finest restaurants and not see anyone who looks like
me.
That means committing ourselves, as the black community, to fixing the systemic
barriers — in education, employment and housing — to black upward mobility that
make it virtually impossible for poor African-American children to ever catch up
with their white counterparts.
This is our collective problem. We all have to own it. We all have to fix it.
Until then there is no sanctuary for any of us.
Patricia Williams Lessane is the director of the Avery Institute
of Afro-American History and Culture at the College of Charleston.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 19, 2015, on page A23 of the
National edition with the headline: No Sanctuary in the Holy City.
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is
one of the oldest, most storied black congregations in the South. Its members
met in secret in the years when black churches were outlawed here before the
Civil War, and it contains a shrine to one of its founders, who helped organize
a slave revolt in 1822.
So the mass shooting that took the lives of nine churchgoers, including a state
senator who was pastor, Clementa C. Pinckney, had a particularly deep resonance
in this genteel city, proud and mindful of its history but still torn by race
and class.
“Christ said to Peter, ‘Upon this rock I will build my church,’” said
Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, the highest-ranking
African-American in the House. He flew to Charleston on Thursday morning to
attend a prayer vigil for the shooting victims.
“Emanuel A.M.E. Church is the rock upon which the A.M.E. Church throughout the
South is built,” Mr. Clyburn said. “That church has more historic significance
to Charleston than any other church in this community.”
Intentionally or not, the gunman had found in Emanuel A.M.E., and in its
41-year-old pastor, rich symbols to attack with deadly racial hatred. Pastor
Pinckney was a well-known civil rights leader in Charleston. He was elected to
the South Carolina House at age 23, and then to the State Senate at age 27.
After Walter Scott, an African-American, was shot in the back by a North
Charleston police officer in April, Mr. Pinckney helped guide through the State
Legislature a bill requiring officers to wear body cameras.
Jaime Harrison, chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party and a friend of
Mr. Pinckney’s since their teenage years, said all the young Democrats coming up
together in the state looked up to Mr. Pinckney. “We all aspired to be like
Clementa,” Mr. Harrison said.
Mr. Pinckney was not a divisive figure, community and political leaders say.
State Representative James E. Smith Jr., the minority leader and a Democrat who
was elected to the State House at the same time as Mr. Pinckney, called him, “a
giant voice for justice in South Carolina,” and a conciliatory leader, not a
bomb thrower.
Tyler Jones, political director of the South Carolina House Democratic Caucus,
said, “I have never heard anyone utter a negative word about Clem Pinckney, and
that’s not an exaggeration.”
Mr. Smith, along with others, including Mr. Clyburn, saw the true target as the
church itself.
“It’s in the historic district,” Mr. Clyburn said. “It’s where people go when
they’re touring the city. It’s right around where all the activity is. So he
might have just stumbled upon the church — but I doubt it.”
Photo
Mourners placed ribbons outside Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in
Charleston, S.C., on Thursday. Credit Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse —
Getty Images
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the church in the
African-American South, said Edward Ball, author of “Slaves in the Family,” a
history of Low Country South Carolina. Mr. Ball’s forefathers enslaved the
forefathers of Emanuel A.M.E.’s leading parishioners.
“This church is much more than a place where people sing gospel,” Mr. Ball said.
“It’s tethered to the deep unconscious of the black community.”
Charleston’s historic district has always been home to the city’s white elite,
built on wealth generated by the slave trade and rice that could only be
cultivated as intensively as it was with slave labor. Charleston was one of the
richest cities in antebellum America, and old Charleston has long been known for
its clannish exclusivity.
Many of the African-Americans who were able to remain in the historic district
over the last century have been chased out more recently by gentrification and
soaring property values.
But Emanuel A.M.E. has remained firmly ensconced in what is known as the “Holy
City,” a name inspired by all its church spires.
With its prideful reminders of its legacy of rebellion, “Mother Emanuel,” as it
is known by blacks here, is still “symbolically recognized by everyone as the
thorn in the side of the white body — at the very center of town, the very
center of white society,” Mr. Ball said.
The killing of nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in
Charleston, S.C., is among a long list of attacks targeting predominantly black
churches in the United States.
In 1822, the authorities were tipped off before plans for the slave revolt could
be put in effect; 313 suspected conspirators were arrested, and 35, including
Denmark Vesey, the organizer who was a founder of the church, were executed.
Angry whites in town burned the original church down.
The church, rebuilt in 1891, holds that history dear. A memorial to Mr. Vesey
within its Gothic Revival walls is a reminder not only of the revolt, but also
of Charleston’s past.
In the 1960s, the church was a center of civil rights organizing. The Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the church in 1962.
In his remarks on the killings on Thursday, President Obama acknowledged the
church’s special history.
“This is a place of worship that was founded by African-Americans seeking
liberty,” he said. “This is a church that was burned to the ground because its
worshipers worked to end slavery. When there were laws banning all-black church
gatherings, they conducted services in secret. When there was a nonviolent
movement to bring our country closer in line with our highest ideals, some of
our brightest leaders spoke and led marches from this church’s steps.”
He added, “This is a sacred place in the history of Charleston and in the
history of America.”
On Thursday, Emanuel was off limits, cordoned off from Charleston’s citizens
with police tape and emergency vehicles. The city’s leaders and citizens
gathered at Morris Brown A.M.E. Church, about a half-mile away, for the prayer
vigil.
The walk between the two churches along King Street leads past trendy galleries,
new and trendy restaurants and bars, historical markers and the old American
Theater, whose marquee read, “Pray for our Mother Emanuel AME Church.”
Inside Morris, members of the clergy spoke effusively of unity and vowed not to
let hate divide the city. Blacks, whites, Jews and Christians jammed the aisles,
prayed and sang. A street minister, Mark Irvin, implored “all
European-Americans, all non-African-Americans, whether you think your ancestors
are innocent or guilty, bring yourselves to ask forgiveness from the Lord.”
Bishop John Richard Bryant looked out on the multiracial, multiethnic throng
from the pulpit and pronounced: “You look like what we in the Low Country call a
quilt. You’re patches. You all fit somewhere.”
But in front of the church, under a sweltering midday sun, after the clergy had
gone inside, an angrier group of young men took over. The memory of Walter
Scott’s shooting is still fresh. They held handwritten poster boards declaring,
“Black lives matter.”
Terrence Meyers, 34, held one such sign at King and Morris streets as the crowd
emptied out of Morris A.M.E., chased out by a bomb threat that seemed to
underscore the angrier tone outside the church. He said that as dozens of police
cars were screaming toward Emanuel A.M.E. on Wednesday night, he was pulled
aside and ticketed by a policeman for riding his bicycle home from work on the
sidewalk without a headlight.
He was still furious the next day.
“There’s no such thing as peace, not now,” he said. “Peace is over.”
Jason Horowitz contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on June 19, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: Scene of Carnage Has Long History of Pain,
Pride and Dignity.
LEXINGTON, S.C. — The Facebook profile picture chosen by Dylann
Storm Roof in May is thick with symbolism. It shows Mr. Roof, a scowling young
white man, wearing a black jacket adorned with two flags — one from
apartheid-era South Africa, the other from white-ruled Rhodesia — that have been
adopted as emblems by modern-day white supremacists.
Mr. Roof, 21, was arrested Thursday in North Carolina after law enforcement
officers identified him as the suspect in the mass shooting at a black church in
Charleston, S.C., on Wednesday night. The shooting left nine dead, including the
pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney.
Officials said the shooting was being investigated as a hate crime. Although it
was not clear if Mr. Roof had actually joined any organized white supremacist
groups, people who knew him said that in recent months, a young man they
described as extremely shy had begun to harbor racist views and make
increasingly violent statements about attacking black people.
Joseph Meek, 20, a childhood friend who reconnected with Mr. Roof this year,
said Mr. Roof had changed, spewing racist ideas and talking about wanting “to
hurt a whole bunch of people.”
Dylann Roof, 21, the suspect in the killing of nine people at a Charleston
church, was moved from the jail in Shelby, N.C., after his arrest there. By
Reuters on Publish Date June 18, 2015. Photo by Chuck Burton/Associated Press.
“He was saying all this stuff about how the races should be segregated, that
whites should be with whites,” Mr. Meek said. “I could tell there was something
inside him, there was something he wouldn’t let go. I was trying to tell him,
‘What’s wrong?’ All he would say was that he was planning to do something
crazy.”
At first Mr. Meek said he did not take Mr. Roof seriously. But he became worried
enough that several weeks ago he took away and hid Mr. Roof’s .45-caliber
handgun, which Mr. Roof had bought with money given to him by his parents for
his 21st birthday. But at the urging of his girlfriend, Mr. Meek returned the
weapon because he was on probation and did not want to get into trouble.
Now Mr. Meek and his girlfriend, Lindsey Fry, both of whom are white, say they
feel guilt about the shooting. “I feel we could have done something and
prevented this whole thing,” Ms. Fry said.
Asked why Mr. Roof picked that particular church, Mr. Meek replied, “Because it
was a black church.”
Another friend, Dalton Tyler, said that Mr. Roof had begun talking about wanting
“to start a civil war.” But like Mr. Meek, he did not always take Mr. Roof
seriously.
Mr. Tyler said on another occasion, the two were driving to a strip club by the
zoo when Mr. Roof saw a black woman, used a racist word and said, “I’ll shoot
your ass.”
“I was just like, ‘You’re stupid,’ ” Mr. Tyler said. “He was a racist; but I
don’t judge people.”
Mr. Roof has had two previous brushes with the law, both in recent months,
according to court records. In February, he attracted attention at the
Columbiana Centre, a shopping mall, when, dressed all in black, he asked store
employees “out of the ordinary questions” such as how many people were working
and what time they would be leaving, according to a police report.
When a police officer questioned Mr. Roof, he “began speaking very nervously and
stated that his parents were pressuring him to get a job,” but then admitted
that he had not asked for applications at any of the stores, the report said.
Asked if he had any contraband, Mr. Roof said no, according to the report, but
the officer searched him and found Suboxone, a prescription drug used to treat
opiate addiction and frequently sold in illegal street transactions. Mr. Roof
admitted that he did not have a prescription for the drug, the report said, and
he was arrested and charged with felony drug possession. The case is pending.
In April, Mr. Roof was charged with trespassing at the same mall. The police
report said he had been barred from the mall for a year after the drug arrest.
Mr. Roof was convicted on that charge, a misdemeanor.
Mr. Roof’s current address is listed in public records as being in this rural
speck of a town southeast of Columbia with an overwhelmingly black population.
On Mr. Roof’s Facebook profile, which was taken down Thursday, many of his 88
friends were black. More than half a dozen cars from the Richland County
sheriff’s office were parked along the dusty driveway outside the two-story
wood-frame home in Eastover. A man in a straw hat came out of the house and told
a reporter: “Make your way right back where you came from. Get off the property
now.”
From school records, Mr. Roof appears to have moved back and forth as a child
between Richland County, which includes Columbia and Eastover, and nearby
Lexington County to the west. He attended ninth grade twice: at White Knoll High
School in Lexington in the 2008-9 school year and, the next school year, at
White Knoll until February 2010, when he transferred to Dreher High School in
Columbia. Neither school district had records of his finishing high school.
A neighbor in Eastover, Debra Scott, 50, said that she had seen Mr. Roof walking
to and from a nearby market but that she knew very little about him or anyone
else who might live in his house. She described the house as “very quiet” and
said Mr. Roof “seemed like a normal kid.”
But Ms. Scott, who is black, said she was “scared to death” after hearing news
reports that Mr. Roof wanted to kill black people. “My concern is that he’s
saying he’s out to kill black people,” she said, unaware that he had been
arrested. “We’re the closest ones to him.”
She added that her grandmother had called her Thursday morning and told her:
“Get out of that bed. That boy was from Garners Ferry,” the name of the street
where she and Mr. Roof lived.
Mr. Meek said that as a child, Mr. Roof would sometimes sleep over at his house.
He described Mr. Roof as so quiet and shy that “his mom pushed him out of the
house and told him to make friends.” He added, “Every friend he made, I made for
him.”
Mr. Roof dropped out of high school after the ninth grade, Mr. Meek said, and
the two fell out of touch. But this year, Mr. Roof sent him a Facebook friend
request and the two got together again, often to go drinking or to strip clubs.
Mr. Roof liked vodka and water, Mr. Meek said, adding, “I never saw him with a
girl.”
He said Mr. Roof worked in landscaping and seemed to live an itinerant life,
sometimes sleeping in his car. In recent weeks his behavior turned more bizarre,
as he talked about wanting to burn an American flag and get his neck tattooed
with the word “dagger.”
The friends last saw Mr. Roof on Tuesday when Ms. Fry found him sleeping in his
car parked on a sandy patch in front of Mr. Meek’s house. Asked if she
considered that odd, Ms. Fry replied, “He does weird things all the time.”
Correction: June 18, 2015
An earlier version of a home page summary with this article misspelled the given
name of the suspect. He is Dylann Roof, not Dylan.
Frances Robles and Jason Horowitz reported from Lexington, and Shaila Dewan from
New York. Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from New York. Susan Beachy
contributed research.
A version of this article appears in print on June 19, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: Flying the Flags of White Power.
When Tywanza Sanders, the poet and peacemaker of the family, saw
the man draw his gun during Bible study and point it as his elderly aunt, Susie
Jackson, he shielded her and tried to talk the gunman into laying down his
weapon, a relative said Thursday.
“That was who he was,” said Kristen Washington, a relative who recounted what
she heard from witnesses to the shooting.
Instead, the gunman killed Mr. Sanders, and then gunned down his aunt and seven
other churchgoers who had driven to the church on a Wednesday night for one
reason: to discuss Scripture, and how to make Jesus’ actions come alive in their
own lives and communities.
The nine victims — three men and six women, who ranged in age from 26 to 87 —
were leaders, motivators, counselors and the people everyone could turn to for a
heap of prayer, friends and relatives said. Led by the Rev. Clementa C.
Pinckney, 41, the pastor of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church who was
also a state senator, the group included a girls’ track coach, a recent college
graduate, a librarian, a university admissions coordinator and others devoted to
churches in the area.
Tywanza Sanders
Mr. Sanders, 26, had graduated from Allen University last year and worked
full-time as a barber to pay his bills. He was proud of his degree in business
administration from Allen, a historically black college, but he wanted more. He
told Torrence Shaw, a friend, that he wanted to go to graduate school to pursue
music production. Mr. Sanders had been researching scholarships.
But it was his personality, even more than his ambition, that left an impression
on his friends and family.
“For him being so young, he was wise,” Mr. Shaw said. “He was always caring and
would give the shirt off his back to anybody. He was the first person I would
always call to get his wisdom and advice.”
The two met in high school and Mr. Sanders helped Mr. Shaw cope with the death
of his father. But he reminded him that, with Mr. Shaw’s older brother away at
school, he had to step up and be the “man of the family.”
Ms. Washington, his cousin, said there was not a lot that would get Mr. Sanders
down. He wrote poetry and attended open mic nights. He loved rap. And he could
not get enough of the water.
Mr. Shaw’s brother Tyrone said Mr. Sanders was focused on getting his life in
order and being positive.
Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45, who was on the church’s ministerial staff, held
two roles at Goose Creek High School. She was a speech therapist, and coached
the girls’ track and field team, the kind of school booster who could never be
missed at games because of all the shouting and cheering.
“She was teaching them track: How to throw the discus, how to do shot, triple
jump, those types of things,” said Jimmy Huskey, the school principal, at a news
conference. “But she taught these young ladies how to be better young ladies.
This is something that can never be replaced.”
Ms. Coleman-Singleton was never the type to preach aggressively. She
demonstrated her faith, not with words, but with her behavior.
“She didn’t go out there and say it or anything else,” Mr. Huskey said. “It was
by her actions. It was what she did for people.”
Ms. Coleman-Singleton had three children, including a son, Chris Singleton, an
outfielder for Charleston Southern University.
Cynthia Hurd, 54, lived amid books. A librarian for 31 years for the Charleston
County library system, Ms. Hurd once said in an interview with a local newspaper
that she loved finding answers, like a detective. But it was working with people
that she loved most about her job, she told the paper. She named Maya Angelou as
her favorite author.
The Charleston City Council announced Thursday that it would rename the St.
Andrews library branch in her honor.
“It is unimaginable that she would walk into a church and not return,” Ms.
Hurd’s brother, Malcolm Graham, a former state senator, said in a statement.
“But that’s who she was — a woman of faith.”
DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49, a minister who loved to sing, had retired from
county government as head of the Community Development Block Grant Program in
2005. Last year, she joined her former school, Southern Wesleyan University, as
the admissions coordinator. Ms. Middleton-Doctor had gotten a master’s degree in
management from there.
“DePayne truly believed in the mission of S.W.U. to help students achieve their
potential by connecting faith with learning,” said the university’s president,
Tom Voss.
The Charleston City Council chairman, Elliott Summey, said as a county worker
Ms. Middleton-Doctor, who had four daughters in junior high through college,
tended to the needs of underprivileged communities. “In a very big way, she was
doing very human, kindly things,” he said.
Like others attending the Bible study, Ethel Lee Lance, 70, was dedicated to
Emanuel. She was a sexton at the church and had worked there for three decades,
her grandson told The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C.
Ms. Jackson, 87, Mr. Sanders’s aunt, was a longtime Emanuel churchgoer in a
spiritually rooted family that considered churchgoing as nonnegotiable.
Myra Thompson, 59, had traveled over from Holy Trinity Reformed Episcopal
Church, the church where her husband, the Rev. Anthony Thompson, serves as
vicar, to join the study group.
The Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr., 74, had made a similar journey. He was a
retired pastor from another church but would regularly stop by Emanuel,
according to his daughter-in-law, Arcelia Simmons of Newport News, Va. Mr.
Simmons was the only victim to die at the hospital.
“Many people are struggling with this right now, and we think it’s a time to
start the healing process,” Mr. Huskey, the principal, said.
“We’re in a society today that is broken, pretty much,” he added. “And there
will be a time when those times will be made right.”
A version of this article appears in print on June 19, 2015, on page A17 of the
New York edition with the headline: Recalling Nine Spiritual Mentors, Gunned
Down During Night of Devotion.
CHARLESTON, S.C. — The mass murder of nine people who gathered
Wednesday night for Bible study at a landmark black church has shaken a city
whose history from slavery to the Civil War to the present is inseparable from
the nation’s anguished struggle with race.
Fourteen hours after the massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church,
in which the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, the church pastor and a prominent state
senator, was among the dead, the police in Shelby, N.C., acting on a tip from a
motorist, on Thursday arrested Dylann Storm Roof, a 21-year-old white man with
an unsettled personal life and a recent history of anti-black views.
The killings, with victims ranging in age from 26 to 87, left people stunned and
grieving. Witnesses said Mr. Roof sat with church members for an hour and then
started venting against African-Americans and opened fire on the group.
At Morris Brown A.M.E. Church here, blacks, whites, Christians and Jews gathered
to proclaim that a racist gunman would not divide a community already tested by
the fatal police shooting in April of an unarmed African-American, Walter Scott.
“We cannot make sense of what has happened, but we can come together,” declared
the Rev. George Felder Jr., pastor of New Hope A.M.E. Church.
Gov. Nikki R. Haley fought back tears, her voice trembling and cracking, at a
news conference here. “We woke up today, and the heart and soul of South
Carolina was broken,” she said. “Parents are having to explain to their kids how
they can go to church and feel safe, and that is not something we ever thought
we’d deal with.”
President Obama, once again having to confront the nation’s divisions, saw
systemic issues of guns, violence and race in the tragedy in Charleston.
“We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that, once again, innocent people
were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble
getting their hands on a gun,” he said at the White House.
And quoting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after four black girls were
killed in the bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Ala., 52 years ago, he
said the lessons of this tragedy must extend beyond one city and one church. He
cited Dr. King’s words that their deaths were a demand to “substitute courage
for caution,” and urging people to ask not just who did the killing but “about
the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.”
Even amid calls here for calm and compassion, at least three bomb threats were
made Thursday that forced the evacuation of buildings around Charleston,
including churches where prayer vigils were being held for the shooting victims.
And while the racially mixed crowds inside those churches linked arms and
appealed for harmony, the tone among some black people gathered on the city’s
streets was not so conciliatory.
Jareem Brady, 42, said the shooting was only an extension of what black people
face daily. “We’re not worth the air they don’t want us to breathe,” he said of
Charleston’s white citizens.
The church holds a special place in the history of Charleston and particularly
of its African-American population. It has the oldest black congregation south
of Baltimore, according to the National Park Service, and its website calls it
the oldest A.M.E. church in the South. The church’s current Gothic Revival
building was completed in 1891, but the congregation dates to before 1820.
Of those killed, the most prominent was the church’s leader, Mr. Pinckney, 41.
A prayer vigil near the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church early
Thursday. Credit David Goldman/Associated Press
Mr. Pinckney was holding a Bible study session with a small group on Wednesday
when, surveillance video shows, the suspect arrived after 8 p.m. — a slight,
blond man with a bowl haircut and a gray sweatshirt. He sat down with the others
for a while and listened, then began to disagree with others as they spoke about
Scripture, said Kristen Washington, who heard the harrowing story from her
family members who were at the meeting and survived.
Witnesses to the killings said the gunman asked for the pastor when he entered
the church, and sat next to Mr. Pinckney during the Bible study.
They said that almost an hour after he arrived, the gunman suddenly stood and
pulled a gun, and Ms. Washington’s cousin Tywanza Sanders, 26, known as the
peacemaker of the family, tried to calmly talk the man out of violence..
“You don’t have to do this,” he told the gunman, Ms. Washington recounted.
The gunman replied, “Yes. You are raping our women and taking over the country.”
The gunman took aim at the oldest person present, Susie Jackson, 87, Mr.
Sanders’s aunt, Ms. Washington said. Mr. Sanders told the man to point the gun
at him instead, she said, but the man said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m going to
shoot all of you.”
Mr. Sanders dived in front of his aunt and the first shot struck him, Ms.
Washington said, and then the gunman began shooting others. She said Mr.
Sanders’s mother, Felicia, and his niece, lay motionless on the floor, playing
dead, and were not shot.
The gunman looked at one woman and told her “that she was going to live so that
she can tell the story of what happened,” said City Councilman William Dudley
Gregorie, a friend of the woman and a trustee of the church.
“She is still in shock, the carnage was just unbelievable is my understanding,”
he said. “One of the younger kids in the church literally had to play dead, and
it’s my understanding that my friend might have also laid down on top of him to
protect him as well.”
The gunman left six women and three men dead or dying, including a library
manager, a former county administrator, a speech therapist who also worked for
the church, and two ministers. Greg Mullen, the Charleston police chief, called
it a hate crime, and Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch said the Justice
Department was investigating that possibility.
In a photo on his Facebook page, a glowering Mr. Roof wears symbols of two
former white supremacist governments — the flags of apartheid-era South Africa,
and of Rhodesia, the nation that became Zimbabwe. Other photos, posted by a
Facebook friend of his and widely circulated online, show Mr. Roof leaning
against a car with a license plate that reads, Confederate States of America.
The tragedy had a particular resonance in a city that offers perhaps the
sharpest contrast in the South between its cosmopolitan, tolerant present and
its antebellum past, when Charleston was the capital of the slave trade. It was
in Charleston that a state convention adopted the “ordinance of secession” in
December 1860, putting South Carolina on a path to become the first state to
leave the Union, and the first shots of the Civil War were fired four months
later at Fort Sumter.
The shooting reignited demands that the South Carolina Legislature end its
practice of flying the Confederate battle flag on the grounds of the state
Capitol in Columbia.
But if the church shooting prompted comparisons to the 1963 bombing of a black
church in Birmingham by white supremacists that killed four girls, it also
illustrated how much has changed. The earlier bombing took place as black people
struggled to secure basic civil rights, at a time when many were barred from
voting, much less holding office. Alabama’s governor at the time, George C.
Wallace, was the public face of white resistance, and no one was charged with
the crime until 12 years later.
The shooting Wednesday took the life a black state legislator, an arrest was
made in hours, and some of the most emotional expressions of mourning came from
Ms. Haley, whose parents are from India and who is the state’s first female
governor and the first not of European descent.
Local, state and federal law enforcement officials started a manhunt for the
suspect, distributing pictures of him entering the church, and asking people to
be on the lookout for him or his 2000 Hyundai sedan. By midmorning Thursday, he
had been identified as Mr. Roof, described as 5-foot-9 and weighing 120 pounds.
The police said it was a tip from a commuter that led to the arrest.
Deborah Dills was traveling along Highway 74 on Thursday morning from her home
in Gastonia, N.C., to her part-time job at a florist in Kings Mountain, N.C.,
when she spotted a dark Hyundai Elantra with South Carolina plates. The car —
and its driver, Ms. Dills, 51, soon thought — matched the descriptions in the
police alert she had heard on the morning news.
“She got kind of nervous and pulled off,” Mr. Frady said. He insisted she follow
the car, while he called the Kings Mountain police.
Ms. Dills rushed back onto the highway, lined with stores and fast-food
restaurants in a chain of suburbs west of Charlotte, in pursuit of the Hyundai.
Finally at a stoplight near a Walmart in Shelby, N.C., she pulled up behind the
car and read its license plate number to Mr. Frady, who relayed it to the
police.
“That’s it,” he told her. “That’s him.”
A short time later, at 10:43 a.m., the police in Shelby, 250 miles north of
Charleston, pulled over the Hyundai and arrested Mr. Roof. He waived extradition
and was flown to South Carolina on Thursday evening and, amid extraordinary
security, walked into the jail in Charleston County at 7:25 p.m.
Nearby, a 15-year-old boy from North Charleston held a handwritten sign: “Your
evil doing did not break our community! You made us stronger!”
The boy, Hikaym Rivers, said that he doubted Mr. Roof saw his message — and he
questioned whether the suspect would have cared if he noticed the sign — but he
said it was important to make a public statement one night after the shooting in
Charleston.
“We’re supporting our community, and we’re taking a stand that no one can just
take this away from us,” he said. “It’s our peace of mind.”
Jail officials said that Mr. Roof would make a court appearance on Friday
afternoon.
In Charleston, nicknamed the Holy City for its large number of churches, many
houses of worship held prayer vigils, for the dead and for survivors, that drew
people from different communities, races and denominations together.
At Morris Brown A.M.E. Church, just a few blocks from Emanuel, the mood of a
packed house alternated between grief, hope and resilience. Calls of “enough is
enough” echoed as the Rev. John Richard Bryant called for an end to gun
violence.
“You look like a quilt, you look like patches,” Mr. Bryant said. “You all fit
somewhere.”
Hundreds of people packed the pews of the white-columned Second Presbyterian
Church on Thursday evening in a vigil to remember the victims of the shooting.
Pastors read Scripture, the congregation sang and the Rev. Sidney Davis
delivered a rousing sermon, his voice cracking at times. After reading a passage
from the Bible, he said, “Last night, Satan came again. Satan came to say white
and black cannot raise God.”
Later, he told the racially mixed congregation that the bullets were not simply
penetrating the people who died in the church. “It was all of us dying last
night,” he said.
Correction: June 18, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated the location of Shelby, N.C. It is
west, not east of Charlotte.
Nick Corasaniti reported from Charleston, Richard Pérez-Peña from New York and
Lizette Alvarez from Miami. Reporting was contributed by John Eligon, Jason
Horowitz, Jonathan Weisman and Alan Blinder from Charleston, Michael S. Schmidt
and Michael D. Shear from Washington, and Jonathan M. Katz from Kings Mountain,
N.C..
A version of this article appears in print on June 19, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: CHARLESTON MASSACRE SUSPECT HELD AS CITY
GRIEVES.
DALLAS — A gunman attacked Police Headquarters at the edge of
downtown here from inside an armored van early Saturday, shooting at officers
and leaving bags filled with pipe bombs around the building in a brazen assault
that led to an hourslong standoff. Hours after negotiators who had tried to
persuade him to surrender lost contact, the suspect was found dead in the van
after being shot by a police sniper, the police said.
No officers or bystanders were killed or injured in the attack, which began
outside the headquarters and spread to the parking lot of a restaurant in a
suburb of Dallas.
After the suspect fled from Police Headquarters, officers pursued him and
cornered him at the parking lot, where police snipers fired at the vehicle with
.50-caliber rifles and disabled it. Negotiations went on until around 5 a.m.,
when a police sniper shot the suspect through the van’s windshield.
The police did not say whether the sniper fire caused the man’s death. His body
was sent to the Dallas County Medical Examiners Office for an official
determination.
For more than 12 hours Saturday, from shortly after midnight when the assault
began to shortly before 1 p.m. when it ended with the police confirming the
suspect was dead, the gunman — identified by the authorities as James L.
Boulware, 35, of Paris, Tex. — set Dallas on edge, causing evacuations and the
closing of a section of Interstate 45.
Police Chief David Brown said at a news conference that his officers narrowly
escaped injury and death as they dodged bullets. Outside the Police
Headquarters, the attack left a section of the glass-walled front entrance
shattered by more than 20 bullets and the windshield, windows and seats of a
patrol car on the street in front of it riddled with nearly a dozen bullet
holes. One officer searching the headquarters for explosives almost tripped over
a package in a side parking lot that later exploded the moment it was moved by a
police robot. The explosion from that package — a bag with two pipe bombs
affixed with screws, nails, spark plugs and other forms of shrapnel — burned the
front of an SUV parked next to it.
“It raises the hair on the back of your neck pretty quickly just thinking of
what could of happened with his intent and how we literally dodged bullets,”
Chief Brown said.
Early Saturday afternoon, the police bomb squad set off two explosions under the
van as it was parked at the restaurant lot after the end of the standoff. The
second detonation sent thick black smoke rising up out of the vehicle, and
crackling noises like firecrackers could be heard from a distance. Dallas police
officials said on Twitter that the van had caught fire during the detonation,
and several rounds were going off inside. Firefighters started dousing the
burning car with water around 2:30 p.m.
Chief Brown said that when negotiators lost contact with the suspect, they
concluded that he had been fatally wounded. But officers, fearing the van might
be rigged with explosives, held off on approaching the vehicle until it could be
checked by a robot.
Mr. Boulware had told police negotiators that the van was rigged with C-4
explosives. Maj. Max Geron, a spokesman for the Dallas police, said
investigators had found at least two more pipe bombs in the van.
Initial reports indicated that there was more than one gunman. Later, Chief
Brown said the suspect appeared to have acted alone, although officials were not
ready to rule out the involvement of others.
The attack led to a chaotic morning in Dallas, the ninth-largest city in the
country, as the police detonated explosives and evacuated residents from nearby
apartments. Gunfire echoed in deep booms on downtown streets beneath neon-lit
skyscrapers.
The attack started about 12:30 a.m. when Mr. Boulware pulled his dark blue van
outside the headquarters and began shooting at officers, the authorities said.
Police officials said he first approached the front of the building on foot,
opened fire through the glass walls into the lobby and then returned to the
vehicle. Officers and civilian employees were inside the lobby at the time and
suffered no injuries.
Rapid gunfire can be heard in cellphone video shot by bystanders from a
high-rise near the police station. The video shows the van round a corner and
ram into a police cruiser. Two officers standing behind the car with guns drawn
appear to exchange fire with the driver before running for cover.
The neighborhood around the headquarters includes clubs, restaurants and
apartment complexes, and there were apparently dozens of witnesses to what
transpired.
Esther Sim, 33, who lives in the BelleView Apartments across the street from the
police station, said she had heard the gunfire and her husband cried out:
“There’s gunshots, what are you doing? Get down!”
There were two brief pauses, she said, and then the gunfire resumed.
“I couldn’t even count — it was so many shots,” Ms. Sim said.
The police pursued the vehicle as it sped south of Dallas to a Jack in the Box
restaurant parking lot off Interstate 45 in the suburb of Hutchins, a 10-minute
drive from downtown. Officers and the assailant initially exchanged gunfire in
the lot, but telephone negotiations followed.
At some point during the attack and standoff, the attacker called 911 and
identified himself to the police as James Boulware. Chief Brown said Mr.
Boulware went on a long, rambling rant accusing the police of causing him to
lose his child and threatening “to blow us up.”
Investigators retrieved the number and called Mr. Boulware to start
negotiations. During the calls, Mr. Boulware would get angry and hang up. Other
times, he went on long rants. At some point, Chief Brown said, talks ceased.
The authorities had not identified a motive for the attack.
Mr. Boulware had previous contact with the police related to three “family
violence” cases, the authorities said. In one of those cases, he was accused in
April 2013 of attacking his mother, Jeannine Hammond, after they got into an
argument at her Dallas home and making threatening comments about “shooting up
schools and churches.” Mr. Boulware was later arrested in Paris, Tex.
Mr. Boulware was also involved in a custody battle with his mother over his
11-year-old son. A hearing was held last Monday. Ms. Hammond said in court
documents that in the fall of 2012, Mr. Boulware “talked obsessively” about the
mass shootings at the movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and at the elementary
school in Newtown, Conn. “He claimed,” she wrote in court papers, “he had known
about them beforehand because he had dreamed about them.” She also stated that
he bought two new guns in 2013 and “began talking about getting rid of people he
didn’t like.”
In April, a judge gave full custody of the boy to Ms. Hammond and limited Mr.
Boulware’s access to supervised visits to two weekends per month, according to
relatives and court documents. Mr. Boulware’s father, Jim Boulware, said in an
interview Saturday evening that his son was devastated to lose custody.
“He said, ‘Dad, I’ve lost everything. I have nothing left,’ ” Mr. Boulware’s
father said. “I don’t think he was trying to kill anybody. I think he was trying
— the wrong way — to get people’s attention and get his son back.”
Officials did not say what type of weapons the suspect used in the Dallas
assault, but police officials said that based on officers’ accounts, it is
believed that he was wielding an automatic assault weapon and a shotgun. The
suspect took his time discharging the weapons and was able to reload.
“It was very helter-skelter for a long while,” Chief Brown said.
A suitcase found in a garbage bin at another location turned out not to contain
explosives. The police initially said that they were investigating reports that
the suspect may have gotten in the van while it was parked outside the
headquarters, and that another suspect may have failed to get back in the van
before it sped away. They were also looking into a report that a suspect was
shooting at officers from the second floor of an apartment complex near the
headquarters. The police evacuated residents from that complex.
Chief Brown said it appeared to be the same suspect shooting from multiple
positions.
Joshua Guilbaud, 25, who lives in a building across the street from the
headquarters, said in a phone interview that he had gathered with his neighbors
and watched the scene unfold from a window, filming and posting updates on
Twitter as the bullets flew. “This really is the Wild, Wild West,” he wrote.
At first, he said, “I thought it was somebody banging on the wall doing
construction way too late at night.” The exchange lasted about 15 minutes, he
said.
Mr. Guilbaud said that after the gunshots appeared to subside, police officers
knocked on his door and gave him the option to evacuate while the authorities
searched for explosives. On Saturday morning, he and his neighbors remained in
the basement of their building, waiting to be told all was clear.
“It was kind of traumatizing,” he said.
Outside the Police Headquarters late Saturday afternoon, F.B.I. technicians and
police officials were working on a digital map of the crime scene. They were
still picking up shell casings from the pavement of Lamar Street by 4 p.m.
Standing near the patrol car riddled with bullets — one bullet punctured the
windshield and continued through the front seat and out the back of the
partition — Deputy Chief Gilberto Garza III was asked by reporters how no
officers were wounded in the assault.
“It’s hard to explain,” Deputy Chief Garza said. “The officers are trained, and
they adhere to their training. That, with a measure of luck, and by the grace of
God, they survived.”
Correction: June 21, 2015
Because of a transcription error, an article last Sunday about the attack on the
Dallas Police Headquarters misspelled, in some copies, the surname of a witness
to the shooting. She is Anita Grendahl, not Grendhal.
Manny Fernandez reported from Dallas, and Ashley Southall from New York. Patrick
McGee contributed reporting from Dallas, and Katie Rogers from New York. Susan
C. Beachy contributed research.
A version of this article appears in print on June 14, 2015,
on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Suspect Dead After Gun
and Bomb Attack on Dallas Police.
HOUSTON — A shootout among members of several rival motorcycle
gangs in a busy shopping plaza in the Central Texas city of Waco on Sunday left
at least nine bikers dead and 18 others injured, creating chaos in a sprawling
parking lot packed with afternoon shoppers, law enforcement officials said.
The gunfire erupted about 12:15 p.m. outside a Twin Peaks Restaurant, where
members of the motorcycle clubs had gathered. The fight spilled into the parking
lot, initially involving just fists and feet, but escalating quickly to chains,
knives, clubs and firearms. Waco police officers were already at the scene when
the confrontation unfolded because they had anticipated problems as hundreds of
bikers from at least five groups gathered at the shopping plaza.
“There were multiple people on the scene firing weapons at each other,” Sgt.
Patrick Swanton, a Waco Police Department spokesman, said at a news conference.
“They then turned on our officers. Our officers returned gunfire, wounding and
possibly killing several.”
Photo
Officers fired on bikers as the shooting spilled from the restaurant into a busy
parking lot. Credit Rod Aydelotte/Waco Tribune Herald, via Associated Press
Law enforcement officials said the shootout was the worst violence in Waco since
the siege on the Branch Davidian compound in 1993 that left 86 people dead. On
Sunday, eight members of motorcycle clubs were killed at the scene and another
died at a hospital, Sergeant Swanton said. The injured were taken to hospitals
with gunshot and stab wounds.
No officers, shoppers or bystanders were injured. The authorities said their
decision to place officers outside the restaurant before the gunfire erupted
most likely saved lives.
“There were so many rounds fired from bad-guy weapons here, it is amazing that
innocent civilians were not injured here,” said Sergeant Swanton, who added that
investigators expected to recover about 100 weapons. “In 34 years of law
enforcement, this is the worst crime scene — the most violent crime scene — that
I have ever been involved in. There are dead people still there. There is blood
everywhere.”
The police did not identify the groups involved, but photographs of the members
who were arrested showed a number of them in leather jackets bearing the names
of at least three motorcycle clubs: Bandidos, Cossacks and Scimitars.
Hours after the shooting, police officials were still issuing messages on social
media warning people to stay away from the shopping plaza, the Central Texas
Marketplace, saying that it was closed because it was unsafe. “Officers are
continuing to arrest individuals coming to the scene with weapons,” one of the
department’s Facebook postings read. “This is not the time to sight see as we
are dealing with very dangerous individuals.”
The police detained numerous people involved in the fight, Sergeant Swanton
said, and arrested three bikers who were carrying weapons and who were caught
trying to reach the scene after the fighting had quieted down. He said they
would be charged with engaging in organized crime.
Dozens of officers and medics from local, state and federal agencies converged
on the Central Texas Marketplace. A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. office in San
Antonio said agents were assisting the Waco police in the investigation.
The Twin Peaks Restaurant had hosted motorcycle gang members in the past, the
police said. The authorities made little effort on Sunday to conceal their
frustration with the restaurant’s managers, who they said had previously been
uncooperative in dealing with the Police Department’s security concerns about
biker gatherings there.
“We have attempted to work with the local management of Twin Peaks to no avail,”
Sergeant Swanton said. “They have continued to allow these bikers to gather
here, and this is the culmination of what has occurred.” He added: “What
happened here today could have been avoided if we had had management at a local
establishment listen to their police department and assist us. They failed to do
that.”
On Sunday, at least 12 Waco police officers, as well as officers with the
state’s top law enforcement agency, the Texas Department of Public Safety,
worked to secure the area before the shootout started because officials
“expected issues,” Sergeant Swanton said.
“Apparently, the management wanted them here,” he said, “so we didn’t have any
say-so on whether they could be here or not.”
Twin Peaks is a national restaurant chain with several Texas locations. The
restaurant in Waco opened last year, and company officials told a local
newspaper that it would employ 150 people and be able to accommodate more than
350. In an announcement about the restaurant’s opening, Twin Peaks promoted the
location as the “ultimate man-cave,” with at least 55 flat-screen televisions
and 24 types of beer. As recently as last week, the restaurant advertised “Bike
Night” on Thursdays and promised “beers, bites and bikes at the hottest place in
town!”
In a statement, a spokesman for the Twin Peaks Restaurant chain emphasized that
the shooting had occurred outside the restaurant.
“We were shocked by the shootings that took place in the parking lot of our
franchised restaurant in Waco and are fully reviewing all the circumstances
surrounding it,” the spokesman, Rick Van Warner, said. “We are thankful no
employees, guests or police were injured in this senseless violence outside the
restaurant, and our sympathies are with the families of those killed.”
Later, in a phone interview, Mr. Van Warner said the company was “seriously
considering revoking the franchise based on this situation.” He added: “If any
of those allegations are true that there was ample warning to potentially
prevent something of this nature, then there is no way we would allow someone to
continue operating under our own brand.”
Jay Patel, operating partner of the Waco franchise, issued a statement Sunday
night defending the restaurant’s dealings with the police and saying that the
managers “share in the community’s trauma.”
“Our priority is to provide a safe and enjoyable environment for our customers
and employees, and we consider the police our partners in doing so,” Mr. Patel’s
statement read. “Our management team has had ongoing and positive communications
with the police and we will continue to work with them as we all want to keep
violent crime out of our businesses and community.”
Sergeant Swanton said the confrontation appeared to have “started over a parking
issue,” but he declined to elaborate. Another law enforcement official said that
the rival gangs needed no incitement and that simply crossing paths was enough
to cause problems.
Asked if the authorities knew the names of the clubs involved, Sergeant Swanton
said, “We do, but we’re not going to give them the privilege at this point of
putting their names out there.” While emphasizing that the authorities were
still in the early stages of an investigation, he described the biker gangs
involved as “dangerous” and “hostile.”
“This is not a bunch of doctors and dentists and lawyers riding Harleys,”
Sergeant Swanton said. “These are criminals on Harley-Davidsons.”
In a report on gang activity submitted last year to the governor and the state
Legislature, law enforcement officials classified the Bandidos Outlaw Motorcycle
Gang, known as Bandidos O.M.G., as a Tier 2 threat, the second-highest level.
The report, prepared annually by the state Department of Public Safety, noted
that the Bandidos were formed in the 1960s and typically avoided high-profile
activities such as drive-by shootings.
Tier 2 gangs were “responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime across
urban, suburban and rural areas of Texas,” the report said.
Manny Fernandez reported from Houston, Liam Stack from New York and Alan Blinder
from Atlanta.
A version of this article appears in print on May 18, 2015, on page A9 of the
New York edition with the headline: 9 Bikers Are Killed In Shootout In Waco.
Not long after finishing a performance in Brooklyn, Lionel
Pickens, a local rapper better known by his stage name Chinx, headed back to
Queens with a friend. It was early Sunday and they drove to a hookah bar, but
finding it closed, they decided to call it a night.
As Mr. Pickens idled at a red light in his silver, late-model Porsche on Queens
Boulevard, another car pulled alongside. Without warning, shots began crashing
through the half-open driver’s side window at close enough range that detectives
later found a 9-millimeter shell casing inside the Porsche on the front seat.
Mr. Pickens, 31, was struck at least eight times — and possibly many more —
before he managed to pull his car to the curb in front of a Dunkin’ Donuts as
the other car sped away. Taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, Mr. Pickens
died. His friend, Antar Alziadi, 27, survived. The police said he was in stable
condition Sunday afternoon with two bullet wounds to the back and a punctured
lung.
By late Sunday, no arrests had been made, the police said, and detectives were
still searching for video of the killing and the car used by the assailants.
The fatal shooting sent a tremor through the hip-hop community in New York City
and beyond. Mr. Pickens, a frequent collaborator with better-known rappers like
Meek Mill and French Montana, earned fame through his mix tapes and performances
with other rappers but never broke through with a national audience. He was
working toward his first official solo album.
“The hood gotta stop glorifying suckas that kill good people!” Meek Mill wrote
on his Twitter account hours after the killing.
Mr. Pickens came up as a musician under the rapper Stack Bundles, who was killed
in a 2007 shooting at the age of 24. Among Mr. Pickens’s most popular songs was
a collaboration with French Montana titled “I’m a Coke Boy.”
Mr. Pickens grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens, in what was then the Edgemere
public housing project but is now known as Ocean Bay Apartments. On Sunday,
residents there shared news and memories as they lamented how another artist
from the neighborhood embarked on a seemingly promising music career only to be
shot dead in the street.
“The only way out of Far Rockaway is either death or jail,” said one resident,
who gave his name only as Rich.
“There are no success stories out here,” said another resident, who gave his
name as Chris. “You’re killed when you get successful.”
In the mid-2000s, Mr. Pickens spent several years in prison for robbery and drug
sales.
On Saturday night, Mr. Pickens performed at a club in Brooklyn. Afterward, in
the early hours of Sunday, he and Mr. Alziadi headed for a hookah bar along
Queens Boulevard, the police said. By the time they arrived, the bar was closed,
the police said, and Mr. Pickens agreed to drive Mr. Alziadi to a nearby subway
station.
They were heading west along Queens Boulevard through Briarwood in the four-door
Porsche when they hit a red light at 84th Drive, the police said. The gunfire
erupted just after 4 a.m.
The police said Mr. Pickens appeared to have 15 bullet wounds, mostly in his
lower body, though some may have been exit wounds. Two 9-millimeter shell
casings were found in the street and one inside the Porsche, on Mr. Pickens’s
seat, the police said.
Raymond Rivera, 19, said he was walking with friends down 84th Drive when they
heard the sound of gunfire and glass shattering. He said he saw a black Mercedes
sedan swing into a fast U-turn and race away from the scene on Queens Boulevard.
By daybreak, seven bullet holes were visible in the two windows on the driver’s
side of Mr. Pickens’s car, its engine still running. A red hat sat on the
passenger’s side, blood stains visible on the sidewalk next to it.
By the Dunkin’ Donuts on Queens Boulevard, a small shrine took shape, one of the
candles marked with the victim’s name: “R.I.P. Chinx.”
Outside Mr. Pickens’s home in Ozone Park, a few dozen people gathered on the
steps on Sunday afternoon. “Right now, the wounds are still fresh,” a person
said from behind a closed gate. “We’re just asking for some space to mourn this
loss.”
In a past interview with Hot 97, Mr. Pickens talked about explaining the violent
imagery of his lyrics to his two young children, a boy and a girl. “What dad’s
doing is nothing different than what you see in the movies,” he said. “This is a
movie with no picture. I’m just talking about it. This is not real.”
Joe Coscarelli contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on May 18, 2015, on page A15 of the
New York edition with the headline: Rapper Is Fatally Shot While Stopped at
Light in Queens.
His father was police. His uncle and his cousins were also police.
On Friday, nearly a week after he was shot and killed while on patrol in Queens,
Officer Moore was to be laid to rest surrounded by a sea of blue.
As the funeral procession made its way through the streets of Seaford, N.Y., on
Long Island, with uniformed officers escorting the hearse carrying Officer
Moore’s body, thousands more men and women in blue lined the streets in silence.
They offered a final salute to one of their own.
When Officer Moore joined the New York Police Department five years ago, it was
like he was signing up for the family business. At his funeral, that family grew
by tens of thousands at what was expected to be one of the largest police
funerals on Long Island in decades.
But for many, the rituals and routines of the day were grimly familiar.
It has been less than five months since Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu
were fatally shot in a patrol car, targeted by a disturbed young man who set
himself a goal of killing police officers.
Officer Moore, 25, was not targeted because of his badge but rather died
carrying out the perilous duties that come with it.
He was on plainclothes patrol on Saturday with his partner, Officer Erik Jansen,
when the two saw a man walking on a sidewalk, adjusting something in his
waistband. They pulled up alongside the man and asked him what he was carrying.
Then, without warning, the man drew a handgun and shot Officer Moore.
“Due to these cowardly actions, a mother and father are left without their son,
a sister is left without her brother, and his family and friends are left with
emptiness in their hearts that can never be filled,” the Moore family said in a
statement.
Both inside and outside the church, that sentiment was widely held.
Victor Galante, a retired New York City officer, said he only saw two types of
people in the world: good guys and bad guys.
“There is no white or black. No blue, yellow, red, purple,” he said. “There are
those who do good, and those who do bad.”
Officer Brian Moore, he said, “was a really good officer who was killed by a
really bad guy.”
Banti Nath, who works near the church, said that many people in the community
either worked in law enforcement or know someone who does.
“So when something like this happens, the town breaks down,” he said.
Mr. Nath, 36, said everyone in the area he knew had grieved over the death of
Officer Moore and many have tried to find ways to help.
“Everyone is affected by this here,” he said. “Everyone appreciates what the
young man did.”
That is true at every police funeral. But the death of a police officer has a
particular resonance for the community associated with St. James.
Nearly three decades ago another young officer, Edward R. Byrne, 22, was
executed as he sat in his patrol car in Queens. His funeral was held in the same
church where services were held on Friday for Officer Moore.
“It’s horrible for anyone,” Diana Simonetti, a local resident, said as she
struggled to hold back tears. “It’s like losing one of your own.”
On Thursday, thousands paid tribute to Officer Moore at his wake, including Gov.
Andrew M. Cuomo.
“He followed dad into the business,” Mr. Cuomo said. “I know a little bit about
that. I followed my father into the business and there is a sense of love and
respect that that shows from son to father that is louder than any words.”
Photo
Officer Moore's coffin was carried past his family before the start of the
funeral. Credit Josh Haner/The New York Times
Mayor Bill de Blasio also came and spoke with officers. Unlike at the last
police funeral, when scores of officers turned their backs on the mayor, there
was no hint of discord on Thursday.
But with the nation engaged in a heated and sometimes bitter debate about law
enforcement tactics after the deaths of several young black men at the hands of
the police, the funeral was also an occasion for police officers to bond in a
show of unity.
They came from across the country, including people taking part in a national
Police Unity Tour.
On Saturday, they’ll ride from New Jersey to Washington D.C. to pay their
respect to fallen officers during what is known as Police Week. But on this
afternoon, they’re here to join their brothers in arms.
“This is our family,” Detective Omar Daza-Quiroz, a member of the Oakland Police
Department in California, said. “It’s tough right now to be a police officer.
The whole country is looking at us negatively.”
“But people need to come here, and see that we are normal people,” he added. “We
have feelings, too.”
In a show of solidarity, homes and businesses on the streets surrounding the
church were adorned with purple and blue ribbons.
“We support our police,” read one sign. “Blue Lives Matter,” said another.
A truck parked in front of the church had a digital billboard attached, flashing
the American flag. Across the street, a banner laid upon a parked van read:
“Thank you, God, for these brave heroes we call police officers.”
Joanne Archer, 55, went to Target and bought blue paper and string. She used it
to fashion her own ribbons for the wake and funeral of Officer Moore, who, at
25, was just a year older than her daughter.
Ms. Archer, a resident of nearby Levittown, has a number of relatives and
friends in law enforcement. On her own block, two of her neighbors are police
officers. “Long Island is full of blue,” she said.
John Surico and Rebecca White contributed reporting.
GARLAND, Tex. — One was an extrovert drawn to basketball as well
as to Islam, who had been identified by the F.B.I. as a jihadist terrorism
suspect and was once a regular at Friday Prayer at a mosque near his Phoenix
apartment. The other was more quiet, ran a carpet cleaning business in Phoenix
and often prayed at the same mosque, sometimes accompanied by his young son.
It is still not entirely clear what led the two men — Elton Simpson, 30, and
Nadir Hamid Soofi, 34, who lived in the same apartment complex in Phoenix — to
come to this Dallas suburb and open fire Sunday outside a gathering that
showcased artwork and cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
The shootout — during which Mr. Simpson and Mr. Soofi, dressed in body armor,
fired assault rifles at police officers — left both of them dead.
What has become clear, however, is that what took place in a suburban Texas
parking lot near a Walmart has pointed up the volatile tensions between the
West’s embrace of free expression and the insistence of many Muslims that
depiction of the Prophet Muhammad is a sacrilege. It served as a grim reminder
of the attack 16 weeks ago on the Paris offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical
newspaper.
In this case, unlike in the massacre of journalists and cartoonists in Paris in
January, only the gunmen were killed. Mr. Simpson and Mr. Soofi were shot to
death by a Garland traffic officer who was part of a beefed-up security presence
outside the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest, where artists were offered a
$10,000 top prize for the best caricature of the prophet.
It immediately set off a heated debate over art and activism as organizers of
the art exhibit said they intended to celebrate free speech. Pamela Geller, an
organizer of the event, said it was held at Curtis Culwell Center here because
members had heard that a Muslim group had a conference in the same room after
the attack on the Charlie Hebdo office.
She described Sunday’s event as pro-free speech, and said that Muslims had
become a “special class” that Americans were no longer allowed to offend.
Muslim and religious advocates, while denouncing the violence, called the show
an offensive effort to insult Muslims. “The so-called ‘Muslim Art Exhibit’ where
the shooting took place is an event deserving of criticism even absent
yesterday’s violence,” said Rabbi Jack Moline, executive director of the
Interfaith Alliance in Washington.
The two men who opened fire seemed to embody the contradictions of radical Islam
and suburban America. Mr. Soofi once owned a pizza and hot-wings restaurant
called Cleopatra, and he drifted away from the mosque while trying to run it.
Mr. Simpson, an American-born convert to Islam who was adored by the young men
who frequented the Islamic Community Center in northwest Phoenix, was convicted
in 2011 of lying to F.B.I. agents — denying that he had made plans to travel to
Somalia when in fact he had. Federal prosecutors charged that he wanted to go
“for the purpose of engaging in violent jihad,” but a judge ruled that the
government had not proved that part of the charge, and sentenced him to three
years’ probation.
The F.B.I. and the police in Phoenix opened a new investigation into Mr. Simpson
several months ago after he began posting on social media about the Islamic
State, the extremist group also known as ISIS or ISIL, according to law
enforcement officials. As part of that inquiry, the authorities monitored his
online postings and occasionally put him under surveillance, but they had no
indication that he planned to launch the attack in Garland, the officials said.
The F.B.I. had not previously investigated Mr. Soofi, they said. Police officers
and federal agents raided an apartment in Phoenix early Monday that neighbors
identified as Mr. Simpson’s home; public records show Mr. Soofi living in the
same apartment complex, but it was not clear if they lived together.
About the time of the attack Sunday, on a Twitter account with the name “Shariah
is Light” that has since been suspended, someone posted using the hashtag
#texasattack. The profile picture on the account is of Anwar al-Awlaki, a
militant imam killed in a 2011 American drone strike in Yemen.
Mr. Awlaki repeatedly called for violence against cartoonists who, in his view,
insulted the Prophet Muhammad. The Twitter post says that the writer and the man
with him have “given bay’ah,” or pledged loyalty, “to Amirul Mu’mineen,” a title
meaning commander of the faithful that was used by early Muslim rulers and has
been claimed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State. “May Allah
accept us as mujahedeen.”
The nonprofit Middle East Media Research Institute identified the account as
belonging to one of the two gunmen, and said that some of his social media
contacts were known supporters of the Islamic State.
Asked whether the Twitter account was Mr. Simpson’s, a senior law enforcement
official briefed on the investigation said, “That’s certainly what we believe at
this point.” The official, who spoke about the investigation on condition of
anonymity, said there was no evidence so far that the attack had been directed
or planned by a foreign terrorist group, though sorting out the communications
between the attackers and militants using social media and other means would
take some time.
In Washington, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement on
Monday that law enforcement authorities continued to investigate the suspects’
motives.
“While all the facts are not in yet, last night’s attack serves as a reminder
that free and protected speech, no matter how offensive to some, never justifies
violence of any sort,” Mr. Johnson said.
In Phoenix, Usama Shami, president of the Islamic Community Center, a mosque
three miles south of where Mr. Simpson and Mr. Soofi lived, described Mr.
Simpson as well liked among the young men of the mosque.
Joe Harn, a Garland Police Department spokesman, discussed the shooting on
Sunday outside an event in Texas that featured cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
By Associated Press on Publish Date May 4, 2015. Photo by Brandon
Wade/Associated Press.
Mr. Simpson had converted to Islam while in high school and adopted the Muslim
name Ibrahim, Mr. Shami said. Mr. Simpson was focused on the basic issues about
his faith, grounded in questions young converts ask about fasting and the rules
of courtship and marriage, Mr. Shami said.
Mr. Simpson never engaged in radical speech at the mosque, never questioned the
pacifist message sermons were built around, Mr. Shami said.
But Mr. Shami said Mr. Simpson seemed changed after his federal case. He would
show up only occasionally on Fridays. “There were no flashes of anger or
radicalization, just an absence of happiness,” Mr. Shami said.
In a statement, relatives of Mr. Simpson called the shooting an “act of
senseless violence.”
“As a family we do not condone violence and proudly support the men and women of
our law enforcement agencies,” read the statement, which was released by the
Phoenix law firm Osborn Maledon. “We are sure many people in this country are
curious to know if we had any idea of Elton’s plans. To that we say, without
question, we did not.”
A Facebook page that appears to be Mr. Soofi’s says he graduated from the
International School of Islamabad, in Pakistan, in 1998, but a first cousin of
his said he was born in the United States. The page also says he attended the
University of Utah.
“We’re all devastated,” the cousin, who did not want to be identified, said of
Mr. Soofi’s relatives. “We just barely found out just now on CNN.”
Some years ago, Mr. Soofi sold his Phoenix pizza restaurant, which was
struggling. Mr. Soofi had moved to Arizona from Texas, and he and Mr. Simpson
seemed to have struck a friendship, but to Mr. Shami, it was nothing that seemed
out of the ordinary.
On Sunday, the art exhibit and contest unfolded without incident for nearly two
hours beginning about 5 p.m. inside the Culwell center, which is run by the
Garland Independent School District. About 200 men and women were in attendance.
Weeks ago, Garland police commanders, assisted by city and school district
officials, came up with a security plan shortly after the district agreed to
rent the facility to the organizers, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, a
New York-based group that also uses the name Stop Islamization of America.
The group paid an additional $10,000 for security at the event that included
scores of uniformed officers, a bomb squad and a police SWAT team in military
fatigues, the authorities said.
About 6:50 p.m., shortly before the contest was scheduled to end, Mr. Simpson
and Mr. Soofi, in a dark-colored sedan, approached a police patrol car that had
blocked their entrance to the event.
Inside the patrol car at the west entrance to the parking lot were a Garland
traffic officer and a school district security officer, and they were exiting
their vehicle as the sedan drove toward them, the authorities said.
Mr. Simpson and Mr. Soofi stopped their sedan, stepped from their vehicle and
opened fire on the officers, using the back of the car as cover. In a matter of
seconds, the Garland traffic officer shot and killed both gunmen with his
service pistol, officials said.
Officer Joe Harn, a spokesman for the Garland Police Department, said that both
suspects died in the parking lot next to the sedan. The school officer, who was
unarmed, was shot in the lower leg, but was later treated and released from a
hospital.
Manny Fernandez reported from Garland, Richard Pérez-Peña from New York, and
Fernanda Santos from Phoenix. Reporting was contributed by Michael S. Schmidt
and Scott Shane from Washington; Rebekah Zemansky from Phoenix; and Timothy
Williams, Liam Stack and Ashley Southall from New York. Susan Beachy contributed
research.
A version of this article appears in print on May 5, 2015, on page A1 of the New
York edition with the headline: Gunman in Texas Was F.B.I. Suspect in Jihad
Inquiry.
Six people were shot, two fatally, as gunfire erupted outside a
Brooklyn church after a crowded funeral on Monday night, the authorities said.
The shootings began about 8:30 p.m. outside the Emmanuel Church of God, a
Pentecostal church in the 1300 block of Flatbush Avenue, near East 26th Street,
the authorities said. It was not immediately clear how many people fired shots.
As of 10 p.m., no one was in custody.
Investigators believe that all six victims had attended the funeral of a
38-year-old man who died of a heart attack. All six had just left the church and
were on the street when the shooting began.
Witnesses described grabbing children and ducking for cover amid a hail of
gunfire. The shooting started about two hours after the funeral, for Jose Louis
Robles, had ended, as attendees milled around on the street.
Raul Marroqin, 43, who attended the funeral, said that he heard the gunfire, but
had not seen who was shooting.
“I heard so many shots,” he said. “Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. I threw myself to
the floor, grabbed my kids.”
The victims included two 40-year-old men who were pronounced dead at Kings
County Hospital Center. Two women, ages 38 and 29, and two other men, ages 37
and 44, were also hit. One of the victims was in critical condition. Their names
were not immediately released.
Police Department officials said that 15 rounds were fired, and that several
cars quickly left the scene after the shootings. The police said that it
appeared there was more than one gunman, but they did not know the motive for
the shootings. They cautioned that the investigation was in its early stages and
that details could change.
“There’s mass confusion out there,” said Stephen Davis, the department’s chief
spokesman.
Mr. Robles, a father of two who lived in Brooklyn, was known as Cheo. He died on
April 16. An obituary included in a flier from the service described him as
having overcome “many obstacles” and said that he was 60 credits away from a
degree in neuroscience from Manhattan College. Mr. Marroquin, a close friend of
Mr. Robles, said in an interview early Tuesday morning that Mr. Robles had
served time in prison for murder. “He got married in that church, he changed his
life 100 percent. He left the streets. He left the life. Right now, a war
started. This is a war.”
Photo
The funeral card for Jose Louis Robles, who had died of a heart attack at 38.
Credit Rebecca White
A cousin of Mr. Robles’s, who asked to be identified only as Hazel, said she was
in shock. “I’m just trying to piece this together,” she said. “He was a very
beautiful person. He was 38. He died of natural causes. He fell asleep. It was
nothing gang related. That’s why this is very surprising.”
Outside Mr. Robles’s home near Prospect Park, a small memorial had been set up.
At the time of his death, Mr. Robles was a sophomore at Manhattan College, and
had been on the honor roll, said a cousin of his who grew up on the same block
as Mr. Robles and gave only his first name, Mike.
Mike was leaving the church when the shootings began. “The funeral had been
going great,” he said. “Very respectful, and peaceful. His closest friends were
there. And then, gunshots.”
Mike said he did not think his cousin was involved in any gang-affiliated
activities, and he did not know who the victims or the gunmen were.
John Surico contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on April 28, 2015, on page A21 of the
New York edition with the headline: Six Are Shot, 2 Fatally, After Brooklyn
Funeral.
It is now fair to ask whether the National Rifle Association is
winning — or has in fact won — this era of the gun debate in this country.
Gun control advocates have tried to use the horror that exists in the wake of
mass shootings to catalyze the public into action around sensible gun
restrictions. But rather than these tragedies being a cause for pause in
ownership of guns, gun ownership has spiked in the wake of these shootings.
A striking report released Friday by the Pew Research Center revealed that “for
the first time, more Americans say that protecting gun rights is more important
than controlling gun ownership, 52 percent to 46 percent.”
One of the reasons cited was Americans’ inverse understanding of the reality and
perception of crime in this country. As the report spells out, in the 1990s,
people’s perception of the prevalence of crime fell in concert with actual
instances of violent crime. But since the turn of the century, things have
changed: “A majority of Americans (63 percent) said in a Gallup survey last year
that crime was on the rise, despite crime statistics holding near 20-year lows.”
Furthermore, it used to be that the people most worried about crime favored
stricter gun control, but “now, they tend to desire keeping the laws as they are
or loosening gun control. In short, we are at a moment when most Americans
believe crime rates are rising and when most believe gun ownership — not gun
control — makes people safer.”
The report adds: “Why public views on crime have grown more dire is unclear,
though many blame it on the nature of news coverage, reality TV and political
rhetoric. Whatever the cause, this trend is not without consequence. Today,
those who say that crime is rising are the most opposed to gun control: Just 45
percent want to see gun laws made more strict, compared with 53 percent of those
who see crime rates as unchanged or dropping.”
Another cause is most likely the intermingling of politics and high-profile
crimes. As The Christian Science Monitor reported in 2012: “As sure as summer
follows spring, gun sales rise after a mass shooting. It happened after the
shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. It happened after
the Tucson, Ariz., shootings last year that killed six. Now, after the killing
of 12 people last week at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., gun sales are
spiking again — not just in Colorado but around the country.”
It continued: “Self-protection is part of the reason. But a bigger factor, say
gun dealers, is fear of something else: politicians, specifically, their ability
to enact restrictions on gun ownership and acquisition of ammunition. When a
high-profile shooting takes place, invariably the airwaves are full of talk
about gun control.”
It appears to be an extreme example of unintended consequences, or a boomerang:
the more people talk about gun control, the more people buy guns. And not only
do gun sales surge, but apparently so does N.R.A. membership. As The Huffington
Post reported in 2013: “The National Rifle Association’s paying member ranks
have grown by 100,000 in the wake of the December school shooting in Newtown,
Conn., the organization told Politico.”
The report continued: “In the week after the shooting, Fox News reported that
the N.R.A. was claiming an average of 8,000 new members a day. High-profile mass
shootings are often followed by periods of increased interest in the N.R.A., but
representatives said this rate was higher than usual.”
It was after the Newtown shooting that President Obama established a task force,
led by Vice President Joseph Biden Jr., to develop a proposal to reduce gun
violence, which the president said he intended to “push without delay.”
Those proposals, including expanded background checks (which were characterized
as “misguided” by the N.R.A.’s Chris Cox) and a ban on some semiautomatic
weapons, were roundly defeated in the Senate, although polls showed about 90
percent public approval for expanded background checks.
In fact, this month The Washington Times reported: “The American firearms
industry is as healthy as ever, seeing an unprecedented surge that has sent
production of guns soaring to more than 10.8 million manufactured in 2013 alone
— double the total of just three years earlier.”
It continued: “The 2013 surge — the latest for which the government has figures
— came in the first full year after the December 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook
Elementary School, signaling that the push for stricter gun controls, strongly
backed by President Obama, did little to chill the industry despite the passage
of stricter laws in states such as New York, Maryland, Connecticut and
California.”
One may begrudge and bemoan the fact, but it is hard to deny it: the N.R.A.
appears to be winning this round.
I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at
chblow@nytimes.com.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 20, 2015, on page A19 of the
New York edition with the headline: Has the N.R.A. Won?.
The horrifying video of a white police officer in North
Charleston, S.C., shooting and killing an unarmed black man — while the man is
running away — may still come as a shock to many Americans. But this heinous
act, which the officer tried to explain away by claiming that he feared for his
life, strikes a familiar chord in communities of color all across the United
States.
The case underscores two problems that have become increasingly clear since the
civic discord that erupted last year after the police killed black citizens in
New York, Cleveland and Ferguson, Mo. The first, most pressing problem is that
poorly trained and poorly supervised officers often use deadly force
unnecessarily, particularly against minority citizens. The second is that the
police get away with unjustly maiming or killing people by lying about the
circumstances that prompted them to use force.
The shooting death of Walter Scott on Saturday would have passed into the annals
of history unremarked upon had a bystander not used a cellphone to document what
happened after Mr. Scott encountered the police officer, Michael Slager, after a
routine traffic stop.
Mr. Slager subsequently reported by radio that he had shot Mr. Scott after Mr.
Scott wrestled away his electronic stun gun. The video, provided to The New York
Times by the Scott family’s lawyer, shows a different story. The video begins in
the vacant lot, apparently moments after Officer Slager fired his stun weapon at
Mr. Scott. The two men tussle, an object that may have been the stun gun falls
to the ground and then Mr. Scott turns to run away. He appears to be 15 feet to
20 feet away and fleeing when the officer fires eight times. Later in the video,
the officer runs back toward the place where the initial scuffle occurred and
picks up something from the ground and drops it near Mr. Scott’s body.
As The Times noted on Tuesday, police reports say that officers performed CPR
and delivered first aid to Mr. Scott. But the video suggests that they were in
no rush to help. For several minutes after the shooting, the mortally wounded
man remained face down with his hands cuffed behind his back. A second officer
arrives, puts on medical gloves and attends to Mr. Scott but is not shown
performing CPR. As sirens are heard, a third officer arrives, apparently with a
medical kit, but he also is not seen performing CPR. Stunned by Mr. Scott’s
death, a brother is left to ask: “How do you lose your life at a traffic stop?”
Mr. Slager was charged with murder on Tuesday and subsequently fired by the
North Charleston Police Department. The swiftness of the charge was encouraging.
The F.B.I. and the Justice Department, which has opened several civil rights
investigations into police departments under Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.,
is also investigating. On its face, the officer’s conduct seems inconsistent
with rulings by the Supreme Court, which has held that officers can use deadly
force against a fleeing suspect only when there is probable cause that the
suspect “poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the
officer or others.”
Police departments all over the country clearly need to do a better job of
training on how to de-escalate encounters with citizens and explaining when and
how deadly force can be used. To get a handle on this problem, Congress must
compel local police departments to report to the Justice Department all
instances in which officers are fired upon or fire their own weapons at
citizens. During the 1990s, Congress enacted legislation that was intended to
aid the collection of data on officer-involved shootings. But many local
governments do not provide the data because reporting it is optional. Mr. Holder
was on the mark in January when he described this state of affairs as
“unacceptable.”
Better tracking of shooting data is, of course, important. But states and local
governments need to understand that the growing outrage over wrongful death
cases, like the one in North Charleston, undermines trust in law enforcement and
presents a clear danger to the civic fabric. The country needs to confront this
issue directly and get this problem under control.
A version of this editorial appears in print on April 9, 2015, on page A28 of
the New York edition with the headline: The Walter Scott Murder.
WASHINGTON — Nothing has done more to fuel the national debate
over police tactics than the dramatic, sometimes grisly videos: A man gasping “I
can’t breathe” through a police chokehold on Staten Island, a 12-year-old boy
shot dead in a park in Cleveland. And now, perhaps the starkest video yet,
showing a South Carolina police officer shooting a fleeing man in the back.
The videos have spurred calls from statehouses to the White House for more
officers to attach cameras to their uniforms. While cameras frequently exonerate
officers in shootings, the recent spate of videos has raised uncomfortable
questions about how much the American criminal justice system can rely on the
accounts of police officers when the cameras are not rolling.
“Everyone in this business knows that cops have been given the benefit of the
doubt,” said Hugh F. Keefe, a Connecticut lawyer who has defended several police
officers accused of misconduct. “They’re always assumed to be telling the truth,
unless there’s tangible evidence otherwise.”
In the fatal shooting in South Carolina, the most compelling evidence, provided
by a bystander with a camera phone, was shaky and at times unfocused. But the
video clearly showed the officer, Michael T. Slager, firing eight times as
Walter L. Scott, 50, tried to flee after a traffic stop. The officer had said
that he fired amid a scuffle, when Mr. Scott seized his stun gun and the officer
feared for his safety.
“Without the video, we wouldn’t know what we know,” said Matthew R. Rabon, a
college student who joined a demonstration on Wednesday outside City Hall in
North Charleston, S.C., where Officer Slager now faces a murder charge. “And
what we know here is really significant: It’s the difference between an officer
doing his job and an officer killing a man in cold blood.”
Many cities have installed cameras in their police cruisers for years, and some
— an estimated 25 percent of departments that responded to a 2013 survey —
require so-called body cameras. Those numbers are dwarfed by the millions of
Americans who carry camera-equipped cellphones. As cameras become ubiquitous,
the digital video is likely to become a go-to source of impartial evidence in
much the same way that DNA did in the 1990s.
Video evidence is not new, of course; the tape of officers beating Rodney King
in 1991 helped ignite the Los Angeles riots after the officers were acquitted.
When departments began installing dashboard cameras in the 1990s, many officers
opposed it. But they quickly concluded that the recordings often cleared them of
wrongdoing after citizen complaints. “For the most part, unless you are behaving
badly, those things are going to back you up,” said David Harris, a University
of Pittsburgh law professor who studies police practices.
Many officers similarly opposed efforts to videotape confessions, but that
resistance has been fading in recent years. Police organizations have endorsed
the practice, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. recently required the
F.B.I. to start taping interviews.
But cellphone videos taken by bystanders tend to make many police officers
uncomfortable, because they have no control over the setting and often are not
even aware they are being filmed until later. Though the courts have held that
people have a constitutional right to record the police, those who do are
frequently challenged by officers.
While investigating the Police Department in Ferguson, Mo., after a deadly
police shooting last summer, the Justice Department found that officers there
were enraged to discover people taping them.
As an example, a Justice Department report cited a traffic stop in which a
Ferguson officer told the driver’s 16-year-old son not to videotape him. The
confrontation escalated, the officer wrestled the phone away from the teenager,
and everyone in the car was arrested “under disputed circumstances that could
have been clarified by a video recording,” the report said.
Cellphone videos have captured police officers pushing and slapping a homeless
man in Florida and shooting a man who threw rocks at officers in Washington
State. In February, two Pelham, N.Y., officers retired after a video
contradicted their account of an arrest of a black man.
“The ability to record has gotten so prevalent that police can no longer count
on their account to be the truth,” Mr. Harris, the Pittsburgh professor, said.
The increase in cellphone cameras is one reason many police unions do not oppose
requirements that officers carry body cameras, said Chuck Wexler, the head of
the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington. “The big push for body
cameras has been driven in part by the sense that citizens have their phones and
can record, and it was only part of the whole story,” he said.
“We are very used to being videotaped,” said Lt. Mark Wood, the executive
officer in the operations division of the Indianapolis Police Department, where
the department is testing body cameras. “We are under the impression that we are
always being videotaped, because we probably are.”
Data is still spotty, but an early study in Rialto, Calif., suggests that when
officers carry body cameras, they are less likely to use force. Similar studies
in Mesa, Ariz., and in Britain showed that citizen complaints also decreased.
North Charleston, a city of about 100,000 people, has ordered about 100 body
cameras, but its officers are not yet using them. Mayor R. Keith Summey said
Wednesday that he had ordered 150 more “so that every officer that’s on the
street in uniform will have a body camera.”
Marlon E. Kimpson, a South Carolina state senator who represents North
Charleston and helped push for financing for the cameras, said he hoped they
would help calm tensions between residents and officers. He said he believed a
body camera would have prevented Saturday’s shooting. “I don’t believe the
officer would have behaved the way he did had he been wearing a body camera,” he
said.
Even without the video, it is likely that other forensic evidence would have
raised questions about Officer Slager’s account. The coroner found that Mr.
Scott was shot several times in the back, and forensic examiners can typically
tell whether someone was shot at close range in a scuffle or from a distance.
Nevertheless, the dramatic video pushed the shooting into the national
spotlight. Eddie Driggers, the North Charleston police chief, told reporters
Wednesday that he was sickened by the video.
Chris Fialko, a criminal defense lawyer in Charlotte, N.C., said that while the
ubiquity of video had changed the dynamic between the police and citizens,
jurors still viewed police officers as credible, even when faced with
incriminating video.
Mr. Fialko said he once represented an officer in a case where a dashboard
camera had captured the officer slamming a man, who appeared to offer no
resistance, to the ground. The officer testified in his own defense.
“Video can lie,” Mr. Fialko recalled saying in his closing argument. “The cop is
the one out there, hearing what the guy is saying and smelling the guy and
seeing his sweat, and he is acting based on years of experience.”
The jury, Mr. Fialko said, acquitted the officer.
Correction: April 8, 2015
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a college student
who attended a demonstration on Wednesday. He is Matthew R. Rabon, not Rabo.
Matt Apuzzo reported from Washington, and Timothy Williams from New York. Alan
Blinder contributed reporting from Charleston, S.C.
A version of this article appears in print on April 9, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: CITIZENS’ VIDEOS RAISE QUESTIONS ON POLICE
CLAIMS.
I am truly weary, deep in my bones, of writing these columns
about the killings of unarmed people of color by the police. Indeed, you may be
weary of reading them. Still, our weariness is but a dim shadow that falls near
the darkness of despair that a family is thrust into when a child or parent or
sibling is lost, and that family must wonder if the use of deadly force was
appropriate and whether justice will be served.
And so, we can’t stop focusing on these cases until there are no more cases on
which to focus.
Which brings me to the latest case, a truly chilling one: A video shows an
apparently unarmed 50-year-old black man, Walter L. Scott, running away from an
officer after an incident during a traffic stop in North Charleston, S.C.
The officer, Michael T. Slager, fires his weapon eight times, striking Scott in
the back, upper buttocks and ear.
According to The New York Times:
“Moments after the struggle, Officer Slager reported on his radio: ‘Shots fired
and the subject is down. He took my Taser,’ according to police reports.”
But The Times continues:
“Something — it is not clear whether it is the stun gun — is either tossed or
knocked to the ground behind the two men, and Officer Slager draws his gun, the
video shows. When the officer fires, Mr. Scott appears to be 15 to 20 feet away
and fleeing. He falls after the last of eight shots.
“The officer then runs back toward where the initial scuffle occurred and picks
something up off the ground. Moments later, he drops an object near Mr. Scott’s
body, the video shows.”
In fact, the video appears to dispute much of what the police reports claim.
Scott, of course, dies of his injuries.
After the video surfaces, the officer is charged with murder and fired from the
police force. In a news conference, the mayor of the city, Keith Summey, says of
the incident: “When you’re wrong, you’re wrong. And if you make a bad decision,
don’t care if you’re behind the shield or just a citizen on the street, you have
to live by that decision.”
But even the phrase “bad decision” seems to diminish the severity of what has
happened. A life has been taken. And, if the video shows what it appears to
show, there may have been some attempts by the officer to “misrepresent the
truth,” a phrase that one could also argue may diminish the severity of what is
alleged to have happened.
This case is yet another in a horrifyingly familiar succession of cases that
have elevated the issue of use of force, particularly deadly force, by officers
against people of color and inflamed the conversation that surrounds it.
And it further erodes an already tenuous trust by people of color in the police
as an institution. CBS News polling has shown that a vast majority of blacks
believe that the police are more likely to use deadly force against a black
person than a white person (zero percent believe the inverse.) This is not good
for the proper function of a civil society.
As a Sentencing Project report put it last year: “Racial minorities’ perceptions
of unfairness in the criminal justice system have dampened cooperation with
police work and impeded criminal trials.”
And the police are needed in society, so if you don’t trust them, whom do you
call when help is truly needed?
This case has also refocused attention on the power of video evidence and is
likely to redouble calls for the universal implementation of police body cameras
(the video in this case came from a witness). What would have happened if video
of this incident had not surfaced? Would the officer’s version of events have
stood? How many such cases must there be where there is no video?
But I would argue that the issue we are facing in these cases is not one of
equipment, or even policy, but culture.
I would submit that cameras would have an impact on policy and culture, but that
a change in culture must be bigger than both. It must start with “good cops” no
longer countenancing the behavior of “bad cops.” It will start with those good
cops publicly and vociferously chastising and condemning their brethren when
they are wrong. Their silence has never been — and is certainly no longer —
suitable. We must hear from them, not necessarily from the rank-and-file but
from those higher up the ladder.
One of the most disturbing features of the Department of Justice’s report on the
killing of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson was the number of witnesses who said
that they were afraid to come forward because their version of events
contradicted what they saw as community consensus.
But isn’t the unwillingness, or even fear, of “good cops” to more forcefully
condemn bad behavior just the same glove turned inside out?
As Radley Balko wrote in the February 2011 issue of Reason magazine, “For all
the concern about the ‘Stop Snitchin’ message within the hip-hop community,
police have engaged in a far more impactful and pernicious Stop Snitchin’
campaign of their own. It’s called the Blue Wall of Silence.”
This case also highlights once again the issue of police forces not being
representative of the communities they serve. As The Times pointed out:
“North Charleston is South Carolina’s third-largest city, with a population of
about 100,000. African-Americans make up about 47 percent of residents, and
whites account for about 37 percent. The Police Department is about 80 percent
white, according to data collected by the Justice Department in 2007, the most
recent period available.”
And yet there is a vicious cycle of mistrust — re-enforced by cases like this —
that helps to make diversifying police forces difficult. As the International
Business Times put it in August, law enforcement agencies “are often hard
pressed to find black applicants. Recruiters want to fill their ranks with
officers of all backgrounds, experts say, but cultural biases put them at a
disadvantage.”
And lastly, there remains a disturbing desire to find perfection in a case, to
find one devoid of ambiguity, as if police interactions with the public are not
often complicated affairs in which many judgments are made in quick order by all
involved and in which a tremendous amount of discretion is allowed to be
exercised.
Tuesday on CNN, the North Charleston police chief, Eddie Driggers, was asked the
question that is always circling cases like this like a condor: whether he
thought race played a role in what happened. His was a diplomatic and humane
response: “I want to believe in my heart of hearts that it was a tragic set of
events after a traffic stop.” He continued, “I always look for the good in
folks, and so I would hope that nobody would ever do something like that.”
I, too, would hope that nobody would ever do something like that, but it seems
to me that the end of the line has come for hoping alone. Now is the time for
fundamental change: not just in one particular case or with one particular
officer, but also systemically. (The President’s Task Force on 21st Century
Policing has already recommended some policy changes.)
And now is the time for not only considering the interplay of race and power in
these cases, but also the ability to register and respect humanity itself. That
requires a change of culture.
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WASHINGTON — A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C.,
was charged with murder on Tuesday after a video surfaced showing him shooting
in the back and killing an apparently unarmed black man while the man ran away.
The officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, said he had feared for his life because the
man had taken his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop on Saturday. A
video, however, shows the officer firing eight times as the man, Walter L.
Scott, 50, fled. The North Charleston mayor announced the state charges at a
news conference Tuesday evening.
The shooting came on the heels of high-profile instances of police officers’
using lethal force in New York, Cleveland, Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere. The
deaths have set off a national debate over whether the police are too quick to
use force, particularly in cases involving black men.
A White House task force has recommended a host of changes to the nation’s
police policies, and President Obama sent Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to
cities around the country to try to improve police relations with minority
neighborhoods.
North Charleston is South Carolina’s third-largest city, with a population of
about 100,000. African-Americans make up about 47 percent of residents, and
whites account for about 37 percent. The Police Department is about 80 percent
white, according to data collected by the Justice Department in 2007, the most
recent period available.
“When you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” Mayor Keith Summey said during the news
conference. “And if you make a bad decision, don’t care if you’re behind the
shield or just a citizen on the street, you have to live by that decision.”
The shooting unfolded after Officer Slager stopped the driver of a Mercedes-Benz
with a broken taillight, according to police reports. Mr. Scott ran away, and
Officer Slager chased him into a grassy lot that abuts a muffler shop. He fired
his Taser, an electronic stun gun, but it did not stop Mr. Scott, according to
police reports.
Moments after the struggle, Officer Slager reported on his radio: “Shots fired
and the subject is down. He took my Taser,” according to police reports.
But the video, which was taken by a bystander and provided to The New York Times
by the Scott family’s lawyer, presents a different account. The video begins in
the vacant lot, apparently moments after Officer Slager fired his Taser. Wires,
which carry the electrical current from the stun gun, appear to be extending
from Mr. Scott’s body as the two men tussle and Mr. Scott turns to run.
Something — it is not clear whether it is the stun gun — is either tossed or
knocked to the ground behind the two men, and Officer Slager draws his gun, the
video shows. When the officer fires, Mr. Scott appears to be 15 to 20 feet away
and fleeing. He falls after the last of eight shots.
The officer then runs back toward where the initial scuffle occurred and picks
something up off the ground. Moments later, he drops an object near Mr. Scott’s
body, the video shows.
The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the state’s criminal investigative
body, has begun an inquiry into the shooting. The F.B.I. and the Justice
Department, which has opened a string of civil rights investigations into police
departments under Mr. Holder, is also investigating.
For several minutes after the shooting, Walter L. Scott remained face down with
his hands cuffed behind his back.
The Supreme Court has held that an officer may use deadly force against a
fleeing suspect only when there is probable cause that the suspect “poses a
significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or
others.”
Officer Slager served in the Coast Guard before joining the force five years
ago, his lawyer said. The police chief of North Charleston did not return
repeated calls. Because police departments are not required to release data on
how often officers use force, it was not immediately clear how often police
shootings occurred in North Charleston, a working-class community adjacent to
the tourist destination of Charleston.
Mr. Scott had been arrested about 10 times, mostly for failing to pay child
support or show up for court hearings, according to The Post and Courier
newspaper of Charleston. He was arrested in 1987 on an assault and battery
charge and convicted in 1991 of possession of a bludgeon, the newspaper
reported. Mr. Scott’s brother, Anthony, said he believed Mr. Scott had fled from
the police on Saturday because he owed child support.
“He has four children; he doesn’t have some type of big violent past or arrest
record,” said Chris Stewart, a lawyer for Mr. Scott’s family. “He had a job; he
was engaged. He had back child support and didn’t want to go to jail for back
child support.”
Mr. Stewart said the coroner had told him that Mr. Scott was struck five times —
three times in the back, once in the upper buttocks and once in the ear — with
at least one bullet entering his heart. It is not clear whether Mr. Scott died
immediately. (The coroner’s office declined to make the report available to The
Times.)
Police reports say that officers performed CPR and delivered first aid to Mr.
Scott. The video shows that for several minutes after the shooting, Mr. Scott
remained face down with his hands cuffed behind his back. A second officer
arrives, puts on blue medical gloves and attends to Mr. Scott, but is not shown
performing CPR. As sirens wail in the background, a third officer later arrives,
apparently with a medical kit, but is also not seen performing CPR.
The debate over police use of force has been propelled in part by videos like
the one in South Carolina. In January, prosecutors in Albuquerque charged two
police officers with murder for shooting a homeless man in a confrontation that
was captured by an officer’s body camera. Federal prosecutors are investigating
the death of Eric Garner, who died last year in Staten Island after a police
officer put him in a chokehold, an episode that a bystander captured on video. A
video taken in Cleveland shows the police shooting a 12-year-old boy, Tamir
Rice, who was carrying a fake gun in a park. A White House policing panel
recommended that police departments put more video cameras on their officers.
Mr. Scott’s brother said his mother had called him on Saturday, telling him that
his brother had been shot by a Taser after a traffic stop. “You may need to go
over there and see what’s going on,” he said his mother told him. When he
arrived at the scene of the shooting, officers told him that his brother was
dead, but he said they had no explanation for why. “This just doesn’t sound
right,” he said in an interview. “How do you lose your life at a traffic stop?”
Anthony Scott said he last saw his brother three weeks ago at a family oyster
roast. “We hadn’t hung out like that in such a long time,” Mr. Scott said. “He
kept on saying over and over again how great it was.”
At the roast, Mr. Scott got to do two of the things he enjoyed most: tell jokes
and dance. When one of Mr. Scott’s favorite songs was played, he got excited.
“He jumped up and said, ‘That’s my song,’ and he danced like never before,” his
brother said.
Ben Rothenberg contributed reporting from North Charleston, S.C. Kitty Bennett
and Sarah Cohen contributed research.
A version of this article appears in print on April 8, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: Officer Is Charged With Murder of a Black
Man Shot in the Back.
