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

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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

  2. I stopped watching TV and movies (except occasionally some old B&W stuff) about 12-13 years ago.

    You just don’t realize how that crap messes with your head these days until you haven’t watched for a long time, and then are accidentally exposed someplace. And I don’t *necessarily* mean DIY, art or cooking slows, but network TV (even children’s and religioud programming) and modern movies. I literally cannot watch. I’ll be at someones’s house, they have the TV on, and I’ll be sitting there agog. I’ll ask whether they even notice the actual filth and the implied filth, and the person will look at me quizzically. They don’t even notice, RKae. They’re inured to it, or brainwashed or something.

    And probably video games are the same way. Kids wouldn’t see how bad it is until they haven’t played in awhile.

    Unless their parents stopped them.

    Bwahahaha! Sometimes I crack myself up.

  3. Dylann Storm Roof was “sick” in the head and needed treatment (psychotropic drugs)

    Gun control (screening and the like) would not work in this case. Dylann Storm Roof’s stupid father gave him a gun for his 21st birthday!

    Speaking of stupid… “Feminism helped to get them there. In particular, female teachers who either dislike men or are completely ignorant of healthy behaviour norms for boys are creating a generation of emotionally stunted, drugged up young men.”

    CONCEPT of Blogging About Mass Shootings

    http://goodstuffsworld.blogspot.com/2013/09/concept-of-blogging-about-mass-shootings.html

  4. Apparently only criminals are allowed to bring guns into churches there, since anyone who does is breaking the law.

  5. Cops attend my church, and they are in a uniform, fully armed. This being the South, anybody else there could also be armed; we don’t know. Psycho gunmen are welcome there, like all sinners. But I wouldn’t draw down if I were them; anything is liable to happen.

    I think if they posted a “gun-free zone” sign, they’d lose half the congregation.

  6. Until ABC started showing _Agents Of SHIELD_, I hadn’t watched anything on ABC, NBC, or CBS that wasn’t sports since _Twin Peaks_ went off the air.

  7. I of course would not presume to speak for our eloquent host, who is more than capable of speaking for himself. I would just point out that from a certain non-politically-correct point of view, “racist” and “sexist” are not really such horrible epithets, since they’ve been dumbed down to include mere recognition of measurable differences. Now you have to specify that people are “supremacist” if you intend to indicate that they’re bigots; otherwise, you might just mean that they’re scientists.

  8. I once worked with this really sweet, mild-mannered, white-haired old lady who was a retired prison guard. On her breaks, she only read books about serial killers. When I mentioned how I was permanently scarred from just watching the first episode of Dexter, which Netflix had falsely predicted I would love, she said it was her favorite show. In addition to playing Farmville on Facebook, she also played a Dexter game, and expressed frustration at the difficulty of sneaking up behind people so that she could stab them with a syringe and kidnap and torture them to death.

    Maybe she was just working out some kind of emotional trauma from a full career of working around human monsters, but it kind of creeped me out.

  9. Now that Justified is fin, all I watch on TV is boxing.

    Quien es El Mas Macho?

    Remember: the judges and the scorecards don’t matter, just the spectacle; and TV at its best is spectacular. Unfortunately…

    … there is a whoooooole lotta shit on TV. It just isn’t a reliable window on the world. It’s mostly either a chronical of unrestrained ID/wish fulfillment bullshit or an agenda-driven narrative propped up by a parade of horribles.

    The tragic nature of man’s existence is too seldom depicted. Liars/fools everywhere promote the notion that all the bad things that befall man are avoidable or at the very least are someone’s fault.

    I can’t stand it :^(

    BTW Pop can’t stop watching informational murder porn on Tru TV and OWN. Just last night, I had to ask him “could we please watch something tonight that doesn’t revolve around murder?” Sigh… his condition makes it hard to concentrate well enough to enjoy reading the way he did before the heart attack. More’s the pity…

    Stream of consciouness post complete

  11. Oh come on man. None of this is about the civil war. This is all about Marxists riling up the under classes in the hope that they will vote for European Social Democracy and force us conservatives into hiding and not speaking out in public..like European Conservatives do.

  12. It is called programing. It programs the viewer. Music does this as well. Advertising. Hidden; subliminal, items are embedded alongside the overt ones. All these things are designed to sear the conscience. Makes sin acceptable. Their is much information available online. Most people don’t/won’t believe this and are deceived soaking it in. Only Jesus Christ can set one free. Even after accepting Jesus Christ as Savior we have to battle the flesh. He gives us the victory.

  15. In Basic Training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, the soldiers bring their weapons to church on Sunday. Some drill sergeants allow the soldiers to leave their weapons at the barracks, as long as they have another soldier who is not going to church to take responsibility for their weapons.

  16. That IS creepy. I’ve wondered about prison guards after I read some books that included studies showing that many of them are, psychologically speaking, just as messed up as the criminals in terms of propensity for violence, sadism and other things. Not that I’m saying they all are, but that, according to information that I didn’t really take a deep dive into, but the results seem statistically significant.

    Further, I personally know a guy who was a lieutenant in a big city police force, which I will not name. He became a saved Christian, and his life was turned around 180 degrees. In the course of talking about my counseling efforts and questions I had about…let’s say…police ethics, he confessed that in his city, and others, cops were specifically chosen because of violent criminal propensity. And that they were trained to lie, cheat on their wives, and commit other criminal acts so that they could be blackmailed and manipulated by their superiors. I have no personal knowledge of this, but have no reason to doubt him. And he believed that such was the same with prison guards.

    I don’t really want to believe that, but because of my contact’s backgound and the fact that I did have personal reason to believe factually that he was a “new man” in Christ, let’s just say that I myself apply rational evaluations of individuals based upon their words, actions, snd what God chooses to reveal to me about their spirit.

    We live in a dangerous place ruled by satan, my friend, and should always keep that in mind, I say.

  18. I know what you mean. My college actually offered a course in subliminal programming, which I took for a psychology credit (my minor). Fascinating material, I must say.

  19. You come on, man. My post was simply about the right to fly a historic flag, and has nothing to do with Marxists or “riling” or conservatives in hiding. You’re attempting to argue the wrong subject with the wrong person.

  24. Heck some of the priests in my dioceses pack heat gave me some excellent advice on what weapon to buy for my very small hands (due to the amount of harassment I get it seems like a good idea to get a weapon)

  29. The ratio of the number of rounds expended to the number of kills in The A Team is infinite. I don’t recall anyone being killed by gunfire in the series.

  32. I’m going to go out on a limb and say there are at least as many black racists in SC as white …

  33. I’m amused by how many social justice warriors are using the word “racism.” Did they come up with an actual definition of that word I am unaware of? Last I checked they’re the worst institutional racists in America. I suppose it’s possible I’ve missed the Miss White America pageant or the white literary awards and white culture web sites owned by the Washington Post and run by a personal friend of the President but I don’t think so.

  35. Since we’re talking about a social science so soft it can’t be called a science, I could as easily argue violent media allow repressed violence to expend itself. That’s not including the idea humans are as aware special effects are exactly that as do people on roller coasters and state fair haunted houses. No one actually laughs at the idea of meeting a ghoul or being spun off into space to plummet to the ground.

  36. But Grant didn’t keep the nation whole. There had to be a nation first, and that didn’t exist. Grant also took part in the destruction of the constitutional order Lincoln inherited, and Grant destroyed. It’s been downhill since.

    Having said that, libtards are using their normal laundry list of things. None of them are relevant in the incident, but that’s OK since their motives are good and pure.

  38. thanks for a voice of sanity – a welcome change from turning on c-span to hear some deranged birdbrain blaming the NRA

  39. So your contention is that advertising doesn’t work? The fact that Naziism and Mongolian aggressiveness were spread by word of mouth fails to prove that more modern methods have had no effect on recent events. And word of mouth, of course, has played a part in the spread of American violence, too, but media have spread the trend farther and more rapidly.

    For a recent example of the effects of advertising degeneracy take a look at the Bruce/Caitlin phenomenon. It took almost no time for his action to spread through the progressive crowd.

    I suppose my idea is too new for you to absorb at once. Think about it more deeply.

  40. Off-topic from my defense of the Confederate battle flag, but let me point out that the nation was created when nine of the thirteen states ratified the Constitution—nine, not thirteen. The Confederate attempt to dissolve the Union was simply an unconstitutional rebellion. Sort of like the Whiskey Rebellion when you think about it, but more difficult to put down.

  41. I keep pointing out that there was no memo, it’s just a part of human nature that only white people are capable of being raaaaacist’s.
    It must be in our DNA. We’re born that way so why aren’t raaaaacists just accepted for how they were born just like….(you see where I’m going with this)

  44. Hmmm maybe.

    I’m not convinced one way or t’other that violent movies and video games make people more violent. Maybe they do and maybe they don’t.

    Violent crime has been falling in most countries for decades now even as violent media has become more common. On the other hand, disturbed, aggressive people are often fascinated with gore and horror. Might fictional depictions of violence encourage them? It’s possible.

    However, should the vast majority of the population – the sane, law-abiding, normal people, hundreds of millions of whom peacefully enjoy watching horror films or war movies or playing Call of Duty or listening to gangsta rap – have their pastimes censored because the subject matter might help drive the odd crazy person over the edge?

    I’ve got a better idea. Why not establish some sort of secure hospitals where we can send violent, crazy people so they aren’t able to commit atrocities against normal folks?

  45. You’re conflating state with nation. One is a people with a common heritage and hope for the future. The state is the government framework. Based on the notes from the constitutional convention, they produced a federal state as a compact between the states, and no nation existed.

    If you wish to think the south could not leave, you’re welcome to your belief. But there is nothing in the constitution that forbade secession, and at least two states reserved the right to leave in their ordinances of ratification. Consequently, if there was a rebellion, it was the Yankees that were conned into it by Lincoln and his New England money men handlers. Your position is not supported either in law or constitutional history.

  46. Let’s do both. You’ll find it difficult, however, to commit juveniles on the basis of predictions of their mental states, and with some of our recent atrocity-makers the process needed to start in their mid-teens. The Anglo-Saxons held that adult responsibilities started at age twelve. Perhaps they had the right idea.

    With censorship, though, we at least remove one form of encouragement.

    As for violent crime in general recently decreasing, I believe statistics bear that out.But What about mass murders, terrorism and the like? According to appearances we seem to be setting records with those—on the part of individuals and governments both. The Janet Renos as well as the Dylann Roofs need to be controlled.

  47. You can either be a constitutionalist or not. If the former, the evidence is clear that a right of secession is imaginary. That goes for the original thirteen but even more for the states and territories who were later allowed to join.

    Arrogance was the South’s primary downfall, believing that their courage would overcome Northern determination and power. They should have listened to Sam Houston.

    The verdict of history is also clear. We’re far better off today than in the Balkan monstrosity a secessionist USA would have ultimately become with multitudes of independent states and temporary confederations quarreling with one another..

  48. What part of, “But there is nothing in the constitution that forbade secession, and at
    least two states reserved the right to leave in their ordinances of
    ratification,” don’t you understand? It’s really rather simple and far from rocket science. Being a constitutionalist does not prevent one from accepting the legality of secession.

    The 10th amendment pretty much puts paid to any argument you have, along with Lincoln’s ahistorical idea that the union predated the states (The Brits would have laughed at that idea). The way FedGov has turned out, the South was right to fight. At least they can say they tried. Yankees, however, simply acquiesced to their own chains.

    Unless Yankeeland wanted stay on the path the new England money men wanted to set, the north south probably would have come back together. Instead 600K+ men died so New England Money Men could keep their economic colony and give us the mess we have today. And the mess we have today isn’t going to be lasting much longer.

    Jeff Davis would simply say “I told you so.”

  49. “But Ma! You didn’t tell me I couldn’t set the cat on fire.”

    I decline to admit a lack of understanding on my part but clearly see a willingness to twist the Constitution on yours. Amendment X neither authorizes a right of secession nor did the founders intend it to do so. As for the argument that in their ratifications two states reserved the right to secede would, under common law, become void after a short number of years.Three-quarters of a century is sufficient time to get used to being in the Union. To give your claim of a right some credence you must study the Constitution until you find the clause or amendment that states: Congress shall make no law respecting the right of a state to secede from the Union. Possibly that could have been Amendment I.V. But the poor jokers overlooked an escape clause, thank goodness!

    In addition, parts of New England wanted to secede around 1810. They didn’t, so it might be claimed that precedent was established.

    As far as the mess we’re in today, that can be considerably improved in seventeen months, and it’s nothing to the mess we would have been in had the Corn-feds succeeded. With the United States in pieces there would have been no Berlin Wall, simply because Germany and Japan would have divided rule of the world between themselves, with the Nazis getting Mother Russia and the Warlords ruling North America.

    In closing allow me to point out that there is one and only one ultimate justification for revolt—success. That in itself over-rules your right of Southern secession.

  50. I can’t find it now, but I think what I saw was a quote from the statutes concerning concealed weapons permits in S.C., so it wouldn’t apply to open carry, making my statement an overbroad mischaracterization. Sorry about that.

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