Wikipedia now calls it
Charleston church shooting and note that it also refers to
The Virginia Tech shooting (also known as the
Virginia Tech massacre).
We're awash in connotative and denotative differences as much as literal and figurative ones, but a massacre in some ways talks about retrospective, hypothetical actions which have gotten some legislators in trouble already. To some, this dissonance about the scale of killing hinges on an issue of whether arming oneself before going into any religious structure is important as we have become desensitized to hearing about killing of all kinds.
And WTF is a "cooling-off period" when a serial killer murders one less person than a mass murderer; and then there's spree killing which has some kind of temporality and what counts as "almost no time break" - is it the time to reload and how many times. These never matter to the perpetrators.
Mass murder (sometimes interchangeable with "mass destruction") is the act of murdering many people, typically simultaneously or over a relatively short period of time. The FBI defines mass murder as murdering four or more persons during an event with no "cooling-off period" between the murders.
So many legal calculations for people who do evil but it's never about that except for the courts and of course the mediated outrage which now tumbles among talking points and memes - some of which approach the absurd in their motives and agendas.
What seems in the context of recent massacres is the need to screen and take seriously not simply at an institutional level those who have questionable mental soundness and who gain access to firearms.
In the current case, his friends clearly did not want to deal as thoroughly with alcoholism, racism, and potential violence, plus a parent willing to gift the funds to purchase a firearm might not have cared about what now seems obvious behavior. Will we really know if they would have acted differently had they taken his online rants seriously or even his in-person rant about choosing the College of Charleston as a target, with his change in targets due to their being not in term and also with respect to his views on race.
So many possible scenarios and implications for policy, none of which seems to have preventative capability since this is unfortunately not the last of such events given the ubiquity of RW hate in this country and the GOP's willingness to enable inaction.
If firearms operation should have the same kinds of licensing and liability requirements as automobiles, in that hypothetical context would it have been able to prevent the worst of any recent massacre:
The (Virginia Tech) shooting prompted the state of Virginia to close legal loopholes that had previously allowed individuals adjudicated as mentally unsound to purchase handguns without detection by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). It also led to passage of the first major federal gun control measure in more than 13 years. The law strengthening the NICS was signed by President George W. Bush on January 5, 2008
Unfortunately, the actual politics for greater policy change on the operation of firearms seems quite needlessly complicated at the Federal level now even as some shootings don't get to be called massacres.
Democrats and even the occasional Republican are calling on Congress to take up gun control measures again in the wake of the massacre in Charleston, South Carolina.
But in interviews Wednesday, key senators who back federal background checks to keep firearms out of the hands of felons and the mentally ill conceded there’s no easy way to force a debate — let alone a vote — in the GOP-controlled Senate.
And even if they could, there’s next to no chance background-check legislation could pass a much more conservative Senate than the one that spurned a legislative response to the Sandy Hook shootings two years ago, senators said.
As with Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech, the shooters all constructed delusions that were perhaps coherent in mediated form but lacked the skills to reflect upon their criminality.
‘Himizu’: How Charleston Terrorist Dylann Roof Missed the Point of His Favorite Film In his racist manifesto, Dylann Roof cited Japanese provocateur-auteur Sion Sono’s revenge film ‘Himizu’ as his ‘favorite.’ Too bad he was too dumb to understand it.
Prolific provocateur-auteur Sion Sono (Cold Fish, Love Exposure, Tokyo Tribe) adapted Himizu from the manga of the same name but made one vital, timely change. After the devastating Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami rocked Japan on March 11, 2011, killing over 15,000 and displacing and traumatizing thousands more, Sono wrote the national tragedy into his script and filmed scenes among its ruins. As a result, Himizu is at once a film about the sins of past generations wreaking havoc on the future, and a condemnation of Japan’s historically violent relationship with nuclear power. Not the most likely fave film of an American white supremacist millennial, to say the least.
Roof, in his many racist rantings against African Americans, Jews, and Latinos, seems to give the Japanese a pass. But he clearly also misses the point of films like Himizu, which use violence and angst to highlight characters in need of help, not glory. Lauded by critics upon its Venice Film Festival premiere mere months after the Fukushima disaster, Himizu’s moral compass clearly points toward hopefulness instead of hatred.