Gary Younge: Charleston church shooting: Without gun control, racism will keep killing black people
America does not have a monopoly on racism. But what makes its racism so lethal is the ease with which people can acquire guns
This time its different.
Mass shootings have become a banal fact of death in America. (Last year there were 283 incidents in which four or more people were shot.) The nation as a whole, meanwhile, has become newly sensitised to racial violence, with growing activism around police shootings. In April video of a white policeman shooting Walter Scott an unarmed African American eight times in the back in as he ran away in North Charleston, South Carolina, went viral.
But the shooting of nine black church-goers in Charleston (not far from where Scott was killed) by a white gunman in what police are treating as a hate crime marks a doubling down on the nations twin pathologies of racism and guns. Both are deeply rooted in the nations history since its founding: neither are going anywhere soon.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/18/charleston-church-shooting-gun-control-racism-killing-black-people-us