we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another

It's a mystery for the ages what could have motivated this. Truly we'll just never know why did this.

Dickhead shooter's head looks like a dick.

Because someone's gotta say it-
If only they had a gun...

If only Kennedy had an army!

...wait..

Don't worry, Fox News morning show said it: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/06/18/3671110/state-gun-laws-south-carolina/

When will white people take responsibility for their culture of violence?

When we pry it from their cold, dead hands.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not racist. Heck, some of my best friends are white!

re: the terrorism part,

Depends if it turns out to be more of a Timothy McVeigh thing or more of a James Holmes / Adam Lanza thing. It's not so much the body count so much as the whether the motive can be judged to be political.

He is caught. He is a racist from Lexington, South Carolina - not far outside of Columbia, SC but far enough to be remote.

Remote enough that he was probably raised this way.

I think that qualifies him as a terrorist.

Bullshit.

This label everyone a terrorist shit has to stop. The Boston Bombers? Terrorists. The Fort Hood shooter? Terrorist.

This guy isn't a terrorist.

He did massacre a bunch of people to further a political agenda. I'd think that would qualify him, as much as say, Timothy McVeigh.

I get that. His first and foremost agenda however was racist, not political.

So racism isn't political? Slavery, Civil War, Jim Crow, post war housing discrimination, Civil Rights Act, integration, immigration ... ?

Also, according to reports, he had hoped to provoke some sort of larger racial conflict with his actions. And the photo of him looking all emo in the woods he's wearing a jacket adorned with the flags of African apartheid regimes, particularly Rhodesia. He also reportedly made a statement decrying black people 'taking over'. I can agree with KotH on the idea that people can be driven to violence by a sort of personal, non-political racism, but this asshole had wider obsessions.

It's political when we elect one to office. It is political when the asshole shooter is a member of an organized group of racists... So far as we know, he was a loner and not a participant in some sort of larger group.

I get what you are saying, but it is a grey area between calling this asshole someone out to make a political statement and someone acting out their racist anger. Which one was the higher priority for this guy?

It might have been random chance when he killed him, but he also happened to have either killed or straight up assassinated a state senator as well. Dylann hit the religious, the political, the historical, and the personal. There's no escaping that.

By the way, the line "So far as we know, he was a loner...". Indeed, we don't officially have proof (well, the FBI might by now, obviously), but everything he's stated came from historical and still real racist ideologies that have existed on a seriously real level in the South, as well as the North, in addition to other countries. That's been proven, can't deny that.

I happen to purposefully go weekly to websites that have highly racist populations. I do it because I like to understand as much as possible the American people, as an American citizen myself, and to see what the truth is in my own limited ways. If people on these websites, in addition to the long and very real history of a racist South (sorry bud, the South has come a long way, but it still has heavy pockets of prejudice and racism, let alone institutional issues), have had an effect on this kid, then in many ways what he constitutes is a real symbol of racial terrorism. That's an if, but one that we shouldn't fool ourselves about.

It's not as if there isn't a real history of domestic terrorism in the US, by the way.

Then again, the FBI Director said this just recently:

"“Terrorism is act of violence done or threatens to in order to try to influence a public body or citizenry so it’s more of a political act and again based on what I know so more I don’t see it as a political act. Doesn’t make it any less horrific the label but terrorism has a definition under federal law,” he said during a visit to Baltimore."

On the other hand, Dylann Roof's website was supposedly just uncovered (still needs to be very substantiated - who knows if it's planted by someone with another motive...) and he's saying some deeply disturbing things that are clearly connected to present time but also clearly history. Still might be out of the definition of terrorism though.

He's reportedly confessed to investigators that he wanted to start a race war. I think that's pretty clearly a political act.

His actions definitely satisfy the first and third requirements of the law referenced by Hugh E. below. But what about the second requirement? He supposedly let someone go so she could tell everyone what she saw. Why would he do that unless he wanted to spread fear?

He wanted more notoriety.... That is the only reason. He wanted to be somebody... Where as previously he was essentially just a loser. One thing many of these mass shooters want... and that is to be remembered.

All of the above can be true, y'know. These factors are not mutually exclusive.
What I'm curious about though is why the strenuous objection to the terrorist designation?

I admit it may be more of a personal definition - so allow me that.

Terrorist acts to me have traditionally been an outside group attacking the citizenry(or gov't facility) of a country as an means to strike back against that country's foreign policy.

I think the word/descriptor of "terrorism" has been adopted for many atrocities to garnish not only public support and outcry, but also to allow a different judicial or military approach to the issue. Call something terrorism and a whole different level of law applies or perhaps doesn't apply.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_terrorism_in_the_United_States

18 U.S.C. § 2331 defines ... "domestic terrorism" for purposes of Chapter 113B of the Code, entitled "Terrorism”:

"Domestic terrorism" means activities with the following three characteristics:

Involve acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law;
Appear intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; ... and
Occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.

Points one and three are a given. As to point two, according to witnesses the gunman said, You rape our women and you're taking over this country. I'm pretty sure he was not referring to these nine people specifically, so, yeah, terrorism. If in doubt, imagine the same phrase being said by an Arab to white Americans (throw in an allahu akbar for flavor). Terrorism.

On the list of small blessings, I'm glad he doesn't appear to be a "new atheist" targeting specifically Christians.

Maybe, but you'd better believe some people will try to spin it that way as soon as they find a single Facebook post of his criticizing religion.

It's all a false flag attack we've all been waiting for, to give Obama an excuse to take your guns.

Any moment now. Any moment now..

I don't offer a whole lot to most conversations on SE because i don't have much new or different to say on most subjects. I am one of the few pro gun people on SE so I tend to speak up about those posts. It's hard to defend gun rights when there has been a mass shooting, so I'm not about to try.
The political fall out from this is going to be two things. Dems saying we need more gun control and Repubs saying that Christianity is under attack. They will both try and use this to take further powers and have them do more "for us". This is a horrible thing and the man will be punished. And not to belittle any of that but I don't think we need new or different laws because of it.
My prayers are with the church and the families in that community.

My comment was poking fun at the 'Obama is the Anti-christ and he's going to take our guns away and put us in FEMA internment camps' schtick that has been coming out of your crazier compatriots for eight years. Something which (strangely) hasn't happened yet. Not milking the political fallout, which all politicians will no doubt be guilty of.

Interesting that you feel you're one of the few pro gun people on SE. When I first started discussing this, SE seemed very pro gun to me. Of course I had never spoken to Americans on the subject, and just jumped in to the argument with the assumption that strong gun control was an absolute no-brainer to any human being who wasn't a complete psychopath. I was really knocked back by the amount of pro-gun sentiment from people who in other respects seemed to be rational humans.

Nobody seemed to be jumping in to support me though. So what am I saying? Not sure. Possibly you're feeling a bit victimised. Or, if SE really is generally anti-gun nowadays, it would seem that opinion has shifted in the past ten years.

I totally got that your comment was a joke. And my responce wasn't ment to really make a comment on it. I just thought that it would be disingenuous to only state my side when all the chips were in my favor. I've been very busy and only have limited windows of time to make comments and I don't want this to be a gun rights argument so I didn't want to start a new thread that I wouldn't be able to defend until much later and/or take the point away from were the discusion should be.
One of the things I love about SE that has kept me here for years is how we conduct ourselves. Even when we disagree I feel like we learn from each other. It's way better then reading the comments anywere else.

You know what the problem is in the US? Nine people were killed at a church and all I see on social media is people taking sides of the issue.

Saw on facebook, a little dark humor: "At least they were able to arrest him for impersonating an officer."

True words:

An Emotional Jon Stewart Drops the Comedy to Talk Charleston: ‘We Still Won’t Do Jackshit’

Someone found Dylann Roof's racist manifesto on a site registered to him called lastrhodesian.com