Charleston shooting: gunman kills 9 people at black church

On Tuesday, Dylann Roof was sentenced to death for the racist mass shooting attack on a black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

It was more than a year and a half ago that Roof walked into the church. He did not go in there to learn, pray, and worship, as the predominantly black congregants did. After sitting at the Bible study session for nearly an hour, Roof pulled out a gun and fired 77 shots — killing nine people.

The latest push against the Confederate flag is coming from the pulpit.

On Tuesday, the US Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant Christian denomination in the country, voted that members stop displaying the Confederate flag.

Recent church fires in the aftermath of the mass shooting at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, have invoked painful memories of the long, terrible history of attacks on African-American religious institutions.

Officials haven’t released evidence that suggests the recent church fires were hate crimes, and most aren’t being investigated as arson, according to the Los Angeles Time’s Matt Pearce. The handful of reported church fires also aren’t out of the norm — there were an average of 31 church fires a week in the US between 2007 and 2011, according to National Fire Protection Association data uncovered by Pearce.

On Friday, June 26, President Obama delivered a powerful eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was murdered in the Charleston shootings. In the emotional, wide-ranging speech, Obama connected the mass killing to “a long history” of violence meant to intimidate and terrorize African Americans, and warned that it would be “a betrayal of everything Reverend Pinckney stood for” if America let itself “go back to business as usual.”

The full text of Obama’s remarks follows.

President Obama gave a eulogy Friday for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the South Carolina state senator and pastor who was killed, along with eight others, in a racially motivated June 17 mass shooting.

In his speech, he said, “Every time something like this happens somebody says we have to have a conversation about race. We talk a lot about race. There’s no shortcut. We don’t need more talk.”

Most of the eulogy President Obama delivered today for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, one of the nine people killed in last week’s shooting at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, wasn’t about the shooting itself — which was appropriate. But when Obama did discuss the shooting, while he didn’t exactly call it terrorism, he did situate it within the history of racial terrorism in the US:

As Obama himself has said before, what’s important isn’t just that “Mother Emanuel” was a church, but that it was a black church. In the video above, Vox lays out the history Obama alluded to in today’s eulogy: one in which the black church, and any other symbols of black pride, have been targeted as an affront to white supremacy.

President Barack Obama concluded Friday his eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the South Carolina state senator and pastor killed in the June 17 shooting at Charleston’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, with a rendition of “Amazing Grace”:

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President Obama is delivering the eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the South Carolina state senator and pastor who was among those killed at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston last week. You can watch it here:

Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that it will take much more than pulling down the Confederate battle flag in South Carolina to heal America’s racial divisions.

Speaking less than a week after nine black people were murdered at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and just a few miles from Ferguson, where unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was killed by a white police officer in August, Clinton applauded South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and other Republicans who said Monday that the flag should be removed from the state Capitol grounds.

Southern states are abandoning the Confederate flag — including on their license plates. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe was the first to say he wanted a redesign of the Sons of Confederate Veterans plate, which features the battle flag. Now governors in four other states — Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland, and Tennessee — have followed.

But it’s also because the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 ruling on Friday that states could reject license plate designs that they deem offensive. In an unusual alignment, Justice Clarence Thomas joined with the court’s liberal wing to form the majority. Thomas didn’t write the opinion, so it’s hard to say what his legal reasoning was, but he’s forcefully opposed symbols of white supremacy from the bench before.

Much has been made about whether the Confederate flag is racist in the days after the mass shooting of the historically black Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Even as South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley called to remove the flag from the state Capitol’s grounds, she gave credence to the idea that the Confederate flag is not a symbol of white supremacy and instead is a way to honor fallen soldiers and Southern heritage.

In the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a heavily researched post that should, hopefully, settle the dispute. He pointed to numerous writings from during and before the Civil War era — including some from Confederate leaders — that made it clear Southern states were seceding because they feared the North would take away their ability to enslave black people. Just read South Carolina’s justification when it became the first state to secede after Abraham Lincoln’s election:

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart on Monday called out Fox News on its hypocritical response to the mass shooting of a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

The news network criticized President Barack Obama and others for “taking advantage” of the tragic shooting to advance a narrative regarding gun violence and gun control in the US. “It’s almost like a sickness — like, ‘Oh, tragedy happens. Let’s see how we can advance this narrative,’” Fox News anchor Sean Hannity said.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said Monday that it was time South Carolina removed the Confederate battle flag from its state capitol grounds, in the aftermath of a shooting that killed nine people at a Bible study at the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.

“The events of this past week call upon us to look at this in a different way,” Haley said. In the aftermath of a shooting apparently motivated by white supremacy, even as South Carolina’s state flag and the American flag were lowered to half-staff, the Confederate flag continued to fly.

In response to the Wednesday night shooting at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, President Barack Obama highlighted a troubling fact: America has far more gun violence than its developed peers around the world.

“This type of mass violence doesn’t happen in other advanced countries,” Obama said on Thursday. “It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is within our power to do something about it. I say this recognizing that the politics of this town foreclose a lot of those avenues. But it would be wrong for us not to acknowledge it.”

There are lots of ways to react to the horrifying shooting Wednesday night at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Implying that the attack is about people who hate Christianity isn’t one of the good ones.

“This is one of those situations where you just have to take a step back and say we — you know, you talk about the importance of prayer in this time, and we’re now seeing assaults on our religious liberty we’ve never seen before,” former Senator and current presidential candidate Rick Santorum said. He wasn’t alone: both Sen. Lindsey Graham and Fox News’s E. W. Jackson connected the attack to hatred of Christians.

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart couldn’t find any jokes to make after the mass shooting of a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. His passionate monologue about how the shooting is yet another reminder of the abhorrent levels of gun violence in the US — and America’s inability and unwillingness to do anything to stop that violence — was simply sorrowful, exhausted, and true.

“I honestly have nothing other than just sadness, once again, that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other in the nexus of a gaping racial wound that will not heal yet we pretend doesn’t exist,” Stewart said. “I’m confident, though, that by acknowledging it — by staring into that — and seeing it for what it is, we still won’t do jack shit.

What “counts” as an act of terrorism? It’s a question that is both easy and impossible to answer, and one that many Americans are now debating with regards to the mass murder in Charleston, South Carolina.

That this question has grown so urgent should tell you there is much more at stake here than a matter of terminology.

Nine people were killed in a mass shooting at Emanuel AME Church, a historic black church located in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, Wednesday night.

Within hours, Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen described the attack as a “hate crime.”

President Barack Obama’s remarks on the fatal shooting at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, which killed nine and injured at least one, is only the most recent time he has had to address a mass shooting since he entered office: there have been six other similar domestic events since 2009.

His remarks on Thursday were also one of countless other statements made about gun violence in the US and abroad.

Dylann Storm Roof, the 21-year-old man suspected of walking into a historically black church and massacring nine parishioners, is in all likelihood a white supremacist. We know that not just from his actions: the above photo of Roof, identified by the Charleston Post and Courier, shows him wearing a jacket with the flags of two avowedly racist nations.

That would be apartheid South Africa, which you might be aware of, and Rhodesia, which is a little less known. Here’s a guide to what those flags mean — and why a man who appears to have committed a vicious hate crime would sport them on his jacket.

President Obama offered condolences Thursday to the families of the nine victims, and to Charleston as a whole, after Wednesday night’s shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. In his remarks, he also spoke candidly about mass shootings, which he indicated are a uniquely American problem.

“I’ve had to make statements like this too many times,” Obama said. “Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times. 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.

Clementa Pinckney, pastor of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, was among the nine people killed in a mass shooting at the Charleston church Wednesday night. The alleged killer has been arrested.

Pinckney, who was 41, wasn’t only a religious leader — he was a charismatic state senator whom colleagues described as the moral conscience of South Carolina’s legislature.