GQ profile on Dylann Roof

Definitely worth everyone's times, for various reasons, good and bad, as we'll discuss here. Among other gems is Roof's dad telling the reporter she was "fake news."

A Most American Terrorist: The Making Of Dylann Roof

Also:

Roof is what happens when we prefer vast historical erasures to real education about race. The rise of groups like Trump's Republican Party, with its overtures to the alt-right, has emboldened men like Dylann Roof to come out of their slumber and loudly, violently out themselves.

 

There's a vice mayor out there who once made some ugly tweets. #manysides

 

Did he look in the mirror before going on his rampage?

 

I wonder what, pray tell, is "real education about race."

 

A black woman wrote it, so there are some digressions about her personal journey of self-discovery in reporting it. And she pins an entire section on the premise that people at Roof's church looked at her funny when she came to a service.

But it's pretty well-reported. Roof was mostly a loner. But she talks to some of the few people who did know him. It's good.

 

I just highlighted that passage because it was obviously written before Charlottesville.

The Roof mass shooting is just shocking in its sheer depravity. "GQ," I think, had a good piece recently on the Uber killer, as well.

 

Why is this fucker not speeding straight toward execution?

 

The shooting happened the day after Trump announced. He was emboldened quickly. The passage you highlighted seems a tad revisionist. Is there a larger explanation for the connection in the piece?

 

The teabag nitwits were in full screech well before that.

The Tundra Twat was slobbering about second amendment solutions back in 2008.

Fucko jumped on the train late. He's a symptom as well as a cause.

 

So were you.

 

I know. And you're right. That phrase just leaps out at me, though.

 

Not knowing the peg of the story, I'll post this here anyway:

I never again want to read about killers after the fact. I don't wish to know what was going through their minds, nor the cause of their descent into hell, nor – and this is the big one – how they were trying to rebuild their lives after some troubling skirmishes with the law.

That last one might be the main trigger for people bashing "the liberal press." Nobody wants to read about these fucktards after their killing sprees. At that point there are real victims, and real victims' families and friends whose lives have been suddenly ripped apart, and now we all have to read about how Jimmy Fucktard was struggling to get a break?

Don't "personalize" the shooters' stories anymore, and I'm in favor of not running their mugshots, too.
Every shooter rips apart his own family's lives, though. Those stories do merit press coverage, done carefully.

It's not often the media should turn their heads away, but killers don't deserve any hint of sympathy.