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Dylan Roof is a cracker. He's a backwoods, redneck, bigoted, ginger-ass cracker with a fucking Moe Howard haircut. He's the worst of us - and he does come from America's collective. Make no mistake. There are many more Dylan Roofs. Whether or not they have to gall to carry out their demented fantasies of "reclaiming 'our country'" is another story. but they're out there. They're also terrorists. They're as terrorist is ISIS, or Al Qaeda. He and his ilk should be labeled as such in the media. Their terror is a result of willful historical ignorance and revisionism.
Attack on Christianity? I've heard this too, and it's crap. He picked that church for a reason. It's a historically significant site. It was picked because it was a black church, not because it's a church. Period. Another reason this should be called terrorism.
There are too many people out there who cling to the notion that the Civil War was not about slavery, but rather was about "States rights." That's bullshit. The only state right named in articles of secession is that of slavery. Anyone who advances that is full of shit. It's a cognitive bait and switch to give that racism the cover of legitimacy by adding historical context. It's bullshit. I think it's ironic that Lincoln used the power of the Federal Government to hold the Union together, and subdue the Confederacy while leading the Movement to ratify the 13th Amendment. Now the "Party of Lincoln" currently is opposed to the Feds imposing anything. If Lincoln were alive today, he'd give the GOP leaders, and standard bearers a swift kick in the dick. (another example of the idiocy of looking at modern political parties through the prism of the 1850s - another story)
The Confederate flag also needs to go. From the end of the Civil War, through Reconstruction, and until the Civil Rights movement threatened the Jim Crow order in the 1960s, the Confederate Battle Flag was not used as a symbol of Southern "heritage." It was not added to southern State flags, and public grounds until then. It's a flag of racism, and bigotry because that's when it was resurrected as a symbol. The South, and Southerners have added real richness to us; blues, jazz, bourbon whiskey, Dean Smith, to name a few, but that flag is fucked up and needs to be put into the ashbin of history. It's been hijacked by bigots, and racists as their standard.
My thoughts on guns are established, but they're not germane here. Any sensible limits on guns that most gun owners believe in (i.e. background checks) would not have prevented this. Let's not go down that rabbit hole. I only address it, because others have brought it up. It's way down the list. Ideas are more powerful then weapons, and these cracker-ass bullshit ideas need to be shown for the utter bullshit they are.