After the 2015 attack on the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, commentators hastened to weave a narrative. Some, such as the folks at Fox News, Lindsay Graham and Rick Santorum, endeavored to present it as an assault on religious liberty. This did fit the narrative that Christians are being persecuted in a country whose population and holders of power are predominantly Christian. While the attack did take place in a church, it was a specific church with a history connected to the struggle against slavery and racism in America. If the intended target was just a church, presumably any church would have sufficed. Naturally, it could be claimed that it just so happened that this church was selected and it had nothing to do with its history.
But the killer’s own words made his motivation clear. He said that he acted because blacks were “raping our women” and “taking over our country.” As far as is known, he made no remarks about being motivated by hate of religion in general or Christianity in particular. Those who investigated his background found evidence of racism, but no evidence of a hatred of Christianity Given this evidence, it seems reasonable to accept that he was there to kill black people and not to kill Christians.
Some commentators also claimed the killer suffered from mental illness, despite a lack of evidence. This, as many have noted, is a go-to explanation when a white person engages in a mass shooting or political violence. However, people with mental illness (which is an incredibly broad and diverse population) are far more often victims of violence.
It is tempting to believe that a person who could murder nine people in a church must be mentally ill. After all, one might argue, no sane person would commit such a heinous deed. One reply is that if mental illness is a necessary condition for committing wicked deeds, then such illness must be very common in the human population. Accepting this explanation would, on the face of it, seem to require accepting that all violent criminals are mentally ill. It might even entail that almost anyone who engages in violence would be mentally ill.
One could accept that there is no evil, merely mental illness. This is an option that some accept and some even realize and embrace the implications of this view. Accepting this view does require its consistent application: if a white man who murders nine people must be mentally ill, then an ISIS terrorist who beheads a person must also be mentally ill rather than evil. As might be suspected, the narrative of mental illness is not, in practice, consistently applied.
This view does have problems. Accepting this view would seem to deny the existence of evil (or at least the sort involved with violent acts) in favor of people being mentally ill. This would also be to deny people moral agency, making humans things rather than people. However, the fact that something might appear undesirable does not make it untrue. Perhaps the world is, after all, brutalized by the mad rather than evil.
An unsurprising narrative, put forth by Charles L. Cotton of the NRA, is that the Reverend Clementa Pickney was to blame for the deaths because he was also a state legislator “And he 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. Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue.” While it is true that Rev. Pickney voted against a 2011 bill to allow guns to be brought into churches and day care centers, it is not true that Rev. Pickney is responsible for the deaths. The reasoning in Cotton’s claim is that if Rev. Pickney had not voted against the bill, then an armed “good guy” might have been in the church and might have been able to stop the shooter. From a moral and causal standpoint, this is quite a stretch. The moral responsibility falls on the killer. The blame can be extended beyond the killer, but the moral and causal analysis would certainly place blame on such factors as the influence of racism, the easy availability of weapons, and so on. If Cotton’s approach is accepted and broad counterfactual “what if” scenarios are considered, then the blame would spread far and wide. For example, if he had been called out on his racism and corrected, then he might not have committed the murders. As another example, if the state had taken a firm stand against racism by removing the Confederate flag and boldly denouncing the evils of slavery while acknowledging its legacy, perhaps the churchgoers would not have been murdered.
One could insist that the only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun and that it is not possible to address social problems except through superior firepower. However, this seems untrue.
One intriguing narrative, put forth by Jeb Bush who was once the governor of my adopted state of Florida, is the idea of an unknown (or even unknowable) motivation. Speaking after the alleged killer’s expressed motivations were known (he has apparently asserted that he wanted to start a race war), Bush claimed he did not “know what was on the mind or the heart of the man who committed these atrocious crimes.” While philosophers do recognize the problem of other minds in particular and epistemic skepticism in general, it seems unlikely that Bush embraced philosophical skepticism. While it is true that one can never know the mind or heart of another with certainty, the evidence shows it was racism. To claim that it is unknown, one might think, is to deny what is obvious in the hopes of denying the broader reality of racism in America. It can be replied that there is no such broader reality of racism in America, which leads to the last narrative I will consider.
The final narrative under consideration is that such an attack is an “isolated incident” conducted by a “lone wolf.” When a killer is a white man, this is another go-to explanation used by the right. This narrative allows that the “lone wolf” can be motivated by racism. However, it denies the existence of a broader context of racism in America, such as the Confederate flag that flew proudly on public land near the capital of South Carolina. Instead, the shooter is cast as an isolated hater, acting solely from his own motives and ideology. This approach allows one to avoid the absurdity of denying the shooter was motivated by racism while being able to deny that racism is a broader problem. One obvious problem with the “isolated incident” explanation is that incidents of violence against African Americans is more systematic than isolated, as anyone who knows American history will attest. In regard to the “lone wolf” explanation, while it is true that the alleged shooter seems to have acted alone, he did not create the ideology that motivated the attack. While acting alone, he was a member of a large pack and that pack is still in the wild.
It can be replied that the alleged shooter was, by definition, a lone wolf (since he acted alone) and that the incident was isolated because there has not been a systematic series of attacks across the country in recent years. The lone wolf claim has some appeal since the shooter acted alone. However, when other terrorists attempt attacks in the United States, the narrative is that each act is part of a larger whole and not an isolated incident. In fact, some extend the blame to religion and ethnic background of the terrorist or criminal, blaming all of Islam, all migrants, or all Arabs for an attack.
In the past, I have argued that the acts of terrorists should not confer blame on their professed religion or ethnicity. However, I do accept that the terrorist groups (such as ISIS) that a terrorist belongs to get some of the blame for the acts of its members. Groups that try to radicalize people and motivate them to commit acts of terror deserve some blame for these acts. Being consistent, I certainly will not claim that all or even many white people are racists or terrorists just because the alleged shooter is white. That would be absurd, especially since I am a white guy. However, I some of the responsibility rests with the racist community that helped motivate the shooter to engage in his act of terror.