Dylann Roof: A Ninth-Grade Dropout Who Was Playing Too Many Video Games

Posted on Comments

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air says, “any argument starting off with ‘We don’t have all the facts’ is one that should probably remain unspoken.” That applies to bloggers as much as it does to the President of the United States, and yet it seems people want to score points off the Charleston massacre, rather than to discover why this actually happened.

The why will necessarily involve the who. Let’s understand that “hate” is not an amorphous thing floating around in the air. Hate must have a home in human minds, and so the particular human who pulled the trigger — Dylann Roof — should be the focus of our attention.

Not gun control. Not any other “issue” we may want to push.

Remember the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School? When that happened, I was working at The Washington Times and interviewed retired Army Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a former West Point psychology professor who is author of On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (1995) and co-author of Stop Teaching Our Kids To Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie & Video Game Violence (1999). Col. Grossman is an internationally recognized expert on the psychology of killing and, in 1999, he pointed to the phenomenon of “first-person shooter” games as a known factor in the atrocity committed by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. This wasn’t speculation. It was a matter of fact that the Columbine killers were aficionados of these games, and the predictable reaction whenever someone points to this factor is, “Yes, but lots of kids play those games and don’t become mass murderers.”

Exactly. But you realize the same argument — “X cannot be the decisive influence, because lots of people are exposed to X” — can be used against any “cultural” explanation of behavior. Charles Manson was a hippie guru whose cult followers did a lot of drugs, listened to Beatles records and committed mass murder, but most hippies who did drugs and listened to Beatles records were neither cult members nor mass murderers. So what lessons could we, as a society, have derived from the notorious “Helter Skelter” killings? Most people at the time recognized the Tate-Lobianca murders as conclusive proof that the whole 1960s peace-and-love tune-in-turn-on-drop-out mythology of hippie culture was a lie. Manson collected his followers from among the broken flotsam and jetsam of castoff kids and runaways who flooded into San Francisco during the late 1960s. It was the Law of Large Numbers, really. When millions of kids climbed aboard that kind of bandwagon — rejecting parental authority to pursue a lifestyle of drugs, sex and rock-and-roll — it was inevitable that very bad things would happen to some of them.

You see that the example of the Charles Manson cult is not one chosen at random in this case, because Manson’s “Helter Skelter” fantasy was to incite an apocalyptic race war in America, and Dylann Roof’s murders had the same motive. Also, Dylann Roof had a drug problem. For that matter, Dylann Roof even had a Beatle haircut. Whether or not he was listening to the White Album backwards, we don’t know.

Please excuse my habitual sarcasm, but if you’re following the liberal media coverage of the Charleston shootings, you keep seeing allegedly intelligent people making a few simple-minded connections that may not actually have much to do with Dylann Roof’s crimes. “It’s the guns! It’s the racism! This happened in South Carolina! OMG! They fly the Confederate flag there!” All of this is obviously true, but exactly how much of this is really relevant? There are about 3 million white people in South Carolina, many of whom are racists and gun owners, but they didn’t kill people in Charleston, nor do they condone hateful violence.

As always, the liberal biases of the media lead them into a hasty pell-mell rush to assign collective political blame for a high-profile crime, a bias that fosters false beliefs which in turn have the effect of psychologically disarming society. We cannot prevent crime if we don’t understand crime, and understanding crime requires us to focus on the individuals who commit crime. Yes, the hippie culture of the 1960s was dangerous. And yes, we may say that South Carolina is a particularly “racist” environment. However, most hippies were not mass murderers, nor are most South Carolinians, and the attempt to defame white people in South Carolina by assigning collective blame to them — which is what the liberal media are so obviously doing — is the exact opposite of what responsible journalism is about. Let’s focus on the criminal:

According to classmates, Roof is a frequent abuser of prescription drugs.
Court records from Lexington, [South] Carolina — where he has been living in a trailer park — reveal he was arrested twice this year on charges of trespassing and drug possession. . . .
Roof used to skateboard in a Lexington suburb in South Carolina when he was younger and had long hair then.
Childhood friend Joey Meek had seen him as recently as Tuesday, said Meek’s mother, Kimberly Konzny. . . .
‘I don’t know what was going through his head,’ Konzny said. ‘He was a really sweet kid. He was quiet. He only had a few friends.’Joey Meek alerted the FBI after he and his mother instantly recognized Roof in a surveillance camera image that was widely circulated after the shooting.
In the image, Roof had the same stained sweatshirt he wore while playing Xbox video games in their home recently, Konzny said. It was stained because he had worked at a landscaping and pest control business, she said.
Roof attended ninth grade at White Knoll High during the 2008-09 school year and went there for the first half of the following academic year, district spokeswoman Mary Beth Hill said. The school system gave no reason for Roof’s departure and said it had no record of him attending any other schools in the district.
According to CBS News, school records show that between fourth and ninth grade, Roof attended six different schools, and repeated the ninth grade.

He dropped out of school after ninth grade. His parents were divorced, and his father and stepmother also reportedly had divorced. According to the Wall Street Journal, Dylann’s father had been pressuring him to stop playing video games constantly, and to find steady employment. His grandfather is reportedly a lawyer. His father is a contractor. There are some very interesting clues in this Mother Jones story:

Ken Mathews, an attorney who has been representing Roof in an ongoing drug-possession case, was, he says, “very shocked” to hear about what Roof had allegedly done. He tells Mother Jones, “The dealings I had with him, he was just a normal kid.”
Mathews, a Columbia, South Carolina, attorney, notes that so far in the drug case he has had “very limited dealings” with Roof. He says he saw “nothing that would indicate that [Roof] would take this type of action.” . . .
Mathews has known the Roof family for years, dating back to a custody dispute between Dylann’s father Ben and mother Amy over visitation rights concerning Dylann. . . .

So his family life was disrupted, he was shuttled from one school to another from the time he was nine or 10 years old, he dropped out of school as a teenager, became a drug-addicted loser living in a trailer park, constantly playing video games and, also, Dylann Roof was a racist who sewed Rhodesian flag patches on his jacket and had a Confederate flag tag on his car. OK, then, compare and contrast Dylann Roof to Colin Ferguson, who killed 6 people and wounded 19 others in the 1993 Long Island railroad massacre. Colin Ferguson was a crazy black racist who hated white people:

Ferguson spoke out against coexistence with whites and routinely made calls for retributive revolution. Ferguson regularly accused others around him of racism. During one occasion, Ferguson complained that a white woman in the library shouted racial epithets at him after he asked her about a class assignment. An investigation concluded the incident never occurred. Later, Ferguson attended a symposium by a faculty member discussing her experiences in South Africa. Ferguson interrupted the professor by shouting, “We should be talking about the revolution in South Africa and how to get rid of the white people” and “Kill everybody white!” When students and teachers tried to quiet him, Ferguson started threatening them, repeatedly saying, “The black revolution will get you.”

Colin Ferguson was dangerously crazy, but there are so many crazy people running around loose in America — because you have a “right” to be crazy here — that whenever something like this happens, there is invariably a media narrative about “warning signs” that this particular crazy person was unusually crazy and somebody should have done something about it. The other common media narratives involve guns (because liberals hate guns) and culture (because liberals hate our culture). There seems to be an unwritten rule in liberal media that if a particular crime can be interpreted as indicting America as racist, sexist or homophobic, this crime must instantly become The Most Important News Story of the Week. Liberal journalists salivate like Pavlov’s dog at the prospect of a Matthew Shepard-type hate crime, which can become the topic of a National Conversation About [Whatever], even if details of the case ultimately don’t prove what liberals say the story proves.

Jared Loughner was supposed to be a deranged Tea Party supporter, but when it turned out he was a psychotic obsessed with the 9/11 Truther conspiracy video Zeitgeist, the liberal media immediately lost all interest in Loughner’s motive. If a killer turns out to be just a nutjob, his crime cannot be made the topic of a National Conversation, and if it turns out that the criminal’s background, identity or motive are quite the opposite of the desired liberal narrative, this is Just a Local News Story of no larger national consequence.

My cynical sarcasm about these stories is always intended to highlight the media bias involved, and I do not mean to make light of the actual event. There were about 14,000 murders committed in the United States in 2013, according to the Justice Department. That’s about 38 murders a day or 270 a week. Over the course of a year, the national media will take a sustained interest in a comparative handful of these crimes. Not all murders are created equal, according to the media, and so we find them picking and choosing cases as nationally significant according to criteria that are quite often clearly political. The Creepy Little Weirdo who committed the 2014 Isla Vista massacre in Santa Barbara was a misogynist who left behind a manifesto explaining his resentments against women, and so there was a National Conversation to be had, with feminists lecturing us about What This Means.

Well, here we go again, with an obvious hate crime, and so now the liberal media are going to subject us to lectures about racism, and we shall have a National Conversation which will not mention, for example, that 12 people were killed and 43 wounded in shootings in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend. And we can be almost certain that another dozen people will be killed in Chicago during the Fourth of July weekend coming up. There have been 175 people shot to death in Chicago so far this year, and nearly a thousand others wounded.

Today, June 19, is the 170th day of the year, and already 1,163 people have been shot (175 killed, 988 wounded) in Chicago this year, so by simple math we learn that in the previous 169 days of 2015, there were an average of 6.9 people shot daily in Chicago. That’s 48 shooting victims per week, of whom 7 were killed. Despite this astonishing level of deadly violence in Chicago, however, I can guarantee you that there are people today in Chicago who are watching CNN and shaking their heads about Dylann Root’s hate crime in South Carolina. And some of those people in Chicago (probably about 30 of them) are going to be shot to death in Chicago within the next month. Of course, not every murder in Chicago involves gunfire. People are killed by strangulation, blunt force trauma and other causes, so that there have been more than 200 homicides in Chicago so far this year, and it seems altogether likely that the total number of homicides Chicago this year will exceed 400.

Who is committing all those murders in Chicago? Maybe some crazy dopeheads who dropped out of high school. Just sayin’ . . .





 

130 comments

  1. You know, much of the previous behavior attributed to Dylann Roof is the same thing we see in too much of the black community. Why, it’s almost as though it isn’t skin color, but things like dropping out of school, doing drugs, and not working for a living lead to bad outcomes.

  4. The Confederate Flag is a part of alot of people’s heritage and culture and others do not have a right to extinguish their culture because feelings get riled!! Maybe THEIR culture is offensive to others! That lawyer taking flags off graves was NOT his “right” and people’s ancesters died for THAT flag! WHITE SLAVES ancesters don’t act like that! Lawyer should teach his kid if he wants AND whatever HE wants!(but tradition sez blacks keep mum about WHITE SLAVES!!)

  5. Watch how NO ONE makes him a martyr or builds a monument to him. Note how his family have not come out talking about what a good boy he is. Note that no one is making excuses for him.

  9. Since crime and murder cross all cultures throughout history one’s first stop as for motive is there are bad people who commit crimes. Saying some specific cultural events different one from the other over thousands of years but resulting in the same act doesn’t really wash. Some things don’t have some final settled explanation. Prisons are concrete proof of that dead end.

    However the racist bias built into the media is revealed in the Twitter feeds of so-called “anti-racists.” Although more than twice as many whites die at the hands of blacks year in year out than vice versa, those feeds mysteriously only show black deaths at the hands of whites. If one wants to make a case for institutional racial incitement, first stop is the Presidency and the DOJ. Go from there to colleges and the media. For all I know it’s possible this kid watched Melissa Harris-Perry and Al Sharpton every night. He certainly has no mainstream outlets for lighting up black folks or sites like The Root which will tell you the best places in Europe for blacks right alongside PBS and hotel chain ads. There are no hotel chain ads on Stormfront.

  12. Liberals now want to scold the rest of us about what gun control laws we need. Never mind that three existing laws failed to stop Roof, beginning with the law that prohibits murder. Pray tell, what new law would have done the job.

    But this is far more about never allowing a good crisis to go to waste than it is about stopping future mass murders. The pattern of behavior has not changed. Liberals are liberals.

    Recall what happened in the wake of the Columbine mass murder event:

    During the Columbine massacre, in which 15 people were murdered and 21 injured, a total of four firearms were involved. The murderers also employed four knives and 99 explosive devices.

    Of the firearms, only one qualified under the 1984 federal law as a banned “assault rifle”. One firearm was a doubled barreled shotgun with a shortened barrel. It has long been a federal felony to saw down the barrel of a shotgun and it was also a felony to possess such an altered weapon.

    Every single explosive device was a federal and state felony to assemble, possess and use, and to use in the commission of a crime.

    If the memory of Columbine is ever brought up today, the failure of the law to stop the use of explosives in a school massacre is never mentioned. It is never mentioned because that gets in the way of a Gollum-like fixation on the Precious, starting with the banning of certain firearms and certain accessories but to eventually to banning all firearms.

  13. “There are about 3 million white people in South Carolina, many of whom are racists and gun owners, ”

    You know what? After that quote from what “the other McCain” wrote, just fcuk foff and die.

    Many of whom are racist? No. I don’t believe you. For the last 30 years racist is the worst thing you can be in America. We have all been taught well.

  15. America is experiencing a flare-up of leftism, like herpes. The last time this happened, in the 1960s, we had a rash of assassinations as well as mass shootings.
    When the culture becomes stressed, those least able to resist it snap.

  16. I turned on CBS News last night (first mistake). Whaddya know, they sent lil’ Scott Pelley all the way to Charleston with a whole bunch of other reporters so that they could have wall-to-f*ckin’-wall coverage of this. You could see them just peeing in their pants to advance their racist anti-gun agenda.

    Then, of course, they have the mandatory interview with some a-hole from the SPLC. CLICK

    Nope. No bias here…..

  17. Well, I’ll sympathize with you and say that *some* of them must be racist (instead of “many”), but the point still stands: they didn’t go out and shoot anyone.

  19. Had a young woman on Twitter arguing with me that we need to ban all weapons. When I pointed out that gun bans didn’t stop a British soldier from being decapitated in the middle of the street by an Islamic thug, nor does it stop any other violence in the UK, she, of course, went silent. Thank God for our Constitution, and system of governance otherwise Obama, and the DNC would have moved unilaterally to disarm us.

  20. When I get a good look at the depraved, totalitarian, whining leftist trash that populates the internet I know why we need a second amendment, and every sane person needs to own a firearm.

  21. I guess…who would want to claim the heritage of losers on the wrong side of history.

    Sometimes one needs to move on and create their own heritage.

  23. Neither, for that matter, did Jan Van Riebeeck, Cecil Rhodes, Hendrik Verwoerd or Ian Douglas Smith.

    Says the guy with the Selous Scouts logo for an avatar…

  25. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
    ~~John Adams

    As the Progressives have pursued their agenda of creating a dependency class, an objective moral code is the first thing they needed to destroy. Collectivist ideologies (and racial supremacy or separatism is the crudest of collectivist impulses) cannot allow for moral decisions to reside in the individual.

    I’ll lay odds this murderer (I refuse to use its name) had never stepped one foot into a church until it went to this one.

  26. I can’t even begin to address the insane “reasons” unhinged progressives are coming up…it’s because they fly the Confederate flag…it’s NRA fault it’s Fox News’ fault, and it is Conservative’s fault.

    Meanwhile real mental illness go unrecognized and untreated.

  28. Just think how different the outcome would have been if someone had a conceal and carry permit. The man stopped and reloaded FIVE times. if someone had a weapon may people would be alive today!

  31. The hand-wringing we’re seeing, (and which we see at all such times), proceeds from the misbegotten belief that evil can be eradicated. It cannot. It arises to varying degrees in every human soul born on this earth. Eliminating external variables never eliminates evil, because the variables are as numerous and unique as each individual. The real problem is the human soul and there’s only one cure for what ails it.

  32. God’s book talks about men’s consciences seared with a hot iron in these days. Seared is a Greek work, [katarazo] where we get the word ‘cauterize ‘ from. It’s a picture of soul dead little (and big) monsters, raised in dysfunctional, loveless environments with no instruction in righteousness or morality.

    Our streets are full of people like this of all colors, economic backgrounds, etc. Add in a trashy, violent pop culture, relative morality, psychotropic and street drugs, the influence of the demonic and you get shocking, horrific incidents.

    As WB Yeats wrote in “The Second Coming”:

    “Turning and turning in the widening gyre

    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity…..

  33. You forgot broken homes, which some might claim as a causative factor, but that’s actually just a vast right wing conspiracy.

    Speaking of the black community, this is the best book I’ve read on the subject, one of the best books I’ve read period, by a guy in a position to know what he’s talking about. Best 5 buck ebook I ever bought. He ain’t Thomas Sowell, but his sardonic humor makes up for it.

    http://www.amazon.com/The-Un-Civil-War-Confronting-African-American-ebook/dp/B00BMHY5R4/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1434759255&sr=8-1

  34. Perhaps, but I’m decended from Confederate soldiers, so I don’t find that flag offensive. Whether anyone likes it or not, the fact remains that it’s part of my heritage. And the heritage of some blacks who had ancestors voluntarily fighting for the Confederacy.

    What I find offensive is somebody telling me what I must find offensive, as liberals often do.

  35. What transcends time and culture though, is crazy.

    However, watching Melissa Harris-Perry and Al Sharpton can help us diagnose mental illness.

  36. “…Gollum-like fixation on the Precious.”

    BWAHAHAHA! It’s funny because it’s true.

  37. By now, the MSM has uncovered the voting registration of the shooter and his parents. And haven’t reported it. This does, of course, mean they’re all registered Democrats.

  38. Here is a fact the left would like to ignore to push their agenda…

    Roof Would Have Failed A Background Check

    He was charged with felony possession in February, 2015: According to South Carolina court documents Roof, 21, was arrested in Lexington County on felony charges of possession of cocaine, methamphetamine and LSD on February 28, 2015.

    This alone disqualified him from legal carry and purchase of a firearm but daddy illegally bought him gun on his 21 birthday http://danaloeschradio.com/charleston-roof-would-have-failed-a-background-check

  39. Far more likely it’s liberals’ fault for enabling crazy people to walk the streets instead being institutionalized like they should be. Yet you don’t hear me blaming Melissa Harris-Perry personally, although she may well be the definitive crazy liberal.

  41. This is unfolding just like all the other mass shooters a deeply disturbed young man treated at home with SSR instead of being institutionalized like he would have been 50 years ago. We can lay that directly at ACLU, President Kennedy and the progressives doorstep. They really do have blood on their hands

  42. Are violent video games to blame? Blame is a huge word. Are they cultural pollution? Yes, they are, and I hate them as much as I hate rap and vampire films.

    Our culture is totally different than it was when I was a kid. What’s to blame? No one single thing. It’s a hundred thousand things all nudging the line just a millimeter. Everyone knows how it works: “I’ll nudge the line today, and you nudge the line tomorrow, and we’ll all escape blame.”

    I have said NOTHING about making video games illegal, so please don’t imagine that. But what should happen is that every time we’re exposed to a nut like this it should make other teenagers stop and take stock of what mental toxins they ingest. It should make them ask, “Why do I think sadism is funny?”

    Just once in my life, I’d like to hear a kid say, “I stopped playing video games when I felt like I was turning into a sick-headed jerk.”

  43. No, JV, he bought the gun with his birthday money. How he got past the background check is beyond me.

  44. Vercingetorix and the Gauls? Tecumseh and the Tribal Confederacy?

    Oh, the romance of the lost cause…

  46. Nothing explains Sandy Hook and the “happy parents.” I don’t normally buy into these theories, but as a mother, there is no way in hell I’d be in front of a camera, smiling, just a few hours after the death. I can’t even say it.

  47. He got back a background check pretty easily. The system is broken. He was out on bail for the charge and since it hadn’t been adjudicated into a conviction or even an admittance of guilt. The police that had arrested him were not required to report it to the DoJ. Let alone to the local background check system (if SC has one). Also if you read up on the NICS you will see that by the Code of Federal Regulations that the local police are not required to report to the DoJ, Federal Law Enforcement is required to. Yet, nearly all of the spree/mass killers since the establishment of the 1968 Gun Control Act have been able to dodge the background check process because of how under reported and under submitted the data was. Both the NRA and Brady Handgun group tried to get everything together by saying that if we computerize it then it would be easier to submit data and retrieve data. That was a big compromise in the 1994 AWB fight. The computers were paid for via taxes on firearms and sporting licenses (hunting licenses mainly as well as fees for concealed carry permits). Yet, doing a rough back of the envelope math on the killers most in the news since Columbine. All shows them having violent interactions with the police either mentally, felony crimes or via drug charges. They either plead down or aren’t processed in a timely manner or just aren’t charged period. Even if they are charged or sent to a state run mental ward there is a good chance that the paperwork won’t be filed either because of costs to have someone do that or that it is too time consuming. Heck even the association for gun dealers the National Shooting Sports Foundation has been saying since 1998 that the background check system is broken and needs to be fixed. They have talked about doing the same thing that MADD has asked for which is eliminate funds for environmental projects or other grants unless the reporting systems are improved. http://www.fixnics.org/factinfo.cfm

  48. We need to remember that the “Confederate Flag” that everyone refers to is the battle flag not the Confederate national flag. Anyone who acknowledges the fighting prowess of the Confederates has plenty of good company, including a considerable portion of the Northern military and its leaders. It’s a fine-looking banner as well.

    I say this as someone whose ancestor marched with Sherman, who is an admirer of Grant, and who is very pleased the North kept the nation whole.

  50. Regarding the effect of “shooter” video games, violent movies and videos, and even violent comics, there is no doubt that advertising works. The “not everybody” argument is fallacious. Not everybody buys Big Macs or Pepsis either, but you can bet that without advertising those sales would be far lower.

    And note that the examples above stress the pleasure to be enjoyed by those who consume the products. Likewise the violent media engage the attention of those who hunger after power and public notice, and wish to be seen as significant persons rather than social ciphers.

    You know what I’m getting at. Instead of banning guns we had better consider censoring public media, particularly that portion which appeals to the young and misguided.

    Notice this difference, also. Back in the “old days” popular programs like the Avengers and the A-Team acted out a remarkable amount of violence. Almost none of it, however, was graphic. Indeed, we saw few people die, even when shots were fired by the thousand, or the Earth’s population was under threat of annihilation. Media is much more graphic now, and that’s a significant part of the problem.

Comments are closed.