EDITORIAL: Outrage, sadness over murders of churchgoers

Once again, there is sadness and outrage over the violent, senseless deaths of innocent people.

This time, the victims were exercising a basic freedom of being an American — the right to worship. Gathered for a Bible study meeting Wednesday night at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., nine people were killed by an armed man who had been sitting with the churchgoers for about an hour, reports said.

Nine people gathered for Bible study slain in a house of worship were taken from us in a few moments.

Authorities have arrested a suspect in the case, Dylann Roof, 21. He was captured in Shelby, N.C., at a roadblock, about 220 miles north of Charleston. An uncle of Roof told Reuters that he was “adrift” and that Roof’s father had given him a .45-cal. handgun as a birthday present. According to reports, Roof was armed when he was arrested, but offered no resistance.

Whether this will be classified as a federal hate crime (South Carolina doesn’t have a hate crime statute) hadn’t been determined Thursday. The congregation at Emanual AME Church is African-American and Roof is white, so there is the very real possibility that the slayings were racially motivated. That was reinforced Thursday afternoon when reports said a photo of Roof on social media showed him wearing a jacket bearing the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and the former Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), both of which were ruled by white minorities. Reuters on Thursday quoted an MSNBC report in which a cousin of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, pastor of the church and a state senator, said the gunman reloaded five times during the shooting, saying that “you” were raping “our women” and taking over “our country.”

Just as disturbing is the murderer’s choice of location — a church. It follows mass shootings in 2012 at the movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and the elementary school in Sandy Hook, N.J. What kind of America do we live in when we can’t watch a movie, go to school or even go to church without concern for our well-being? In each case, the gunman opened fire knowing he was unlikely to face any armed resistance from his intended victims. The murderer in each case was as cowardly as he was evil.

And that is what we’re dealing with here — evil. There are people in the world who simply are evil, who get some type of perverse pleasure from hurting and killing others. And they manage to find ways to satisfy their twisted desire.

To the rest of us, it just doesn’t make sense. There is no way to understand the hate and evil that results in such a senseless act of violence. We can only react. The innocent victims of the Charleston murderer deserve to see their killer brought to justice. Their loved ones and friends deserve to see the killer brought to justice. Nothing can replace even one precious life that has been lost, but steps can be taken to ensure that this cruel individual never gets another chance to harm another innocent person.

That, however, doesn’t help today. Today, we can only grieve for those who died, pray for their loved ones and families, and hope that somehow we can find the wisdom and the way to ensure this type of thing never happens again.