America
Shooting at black church reopens American history's dark part: Obama
By
Arun KumarWashington, June 18
Shock and anger engulfed
America as police nabbed a white young man who killed nine people at a
historic black church in Charleston in South Carolina, saying he was
there "to shoot black people".
Mourning the nine deaths at the
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church late on Wednesday night,
America's first African-American President Barack Obama said the
shooting rekindles memories of a "dark part of our history".
In a
short and sombre statement from the White House on Thursday, Obama also
restarted a debate over the nation's recent history with gun violence,
saying, "I've had to make statements like this too many times".
"At
some point we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this
type of mass violence does not happen in other developed countries," he
said.
According to CBS, this was the 14th time Obama made a statement after a mass shooting.
It
was another example, he said, of innocent people being killed because
someone who "wanted to inflict harm" had "no trouble getting their hands
on a gun".
Police on Thursday arrested the suspect identified as
Dylann Roof, 21, of Lexington, South Carolina in Shelby, North
Carolina, a town east of Charlotte and just north of the South Carolina
state line after a massive manhunt.
After Roof's arrest, South
Carolina's Indian-American governor Nikki Haley said: "We woke up today
and the heart and soul of South Carolina is broken."
"So we have some grieving to do, and we have some pain we have to go through," said a choked-up Haley.
"Parents
are having to explain to their kids that they can go to church and feel
safe, and that's not something we've had to deal with."
Charleston
officials said the FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives were helping with the investigation, which is
being categorised as a "hate crime".
The Justice Department is also opening a parallel hate crime review into the case.
Roof
spent an hour in a prayer meeting at the church on Wednesday night
before he opened fire, CNN reported citing Charleston police chief Greg
Mullen.
Among those killed were Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the
church's pastor and a state senator. Other victims in the Charleston
church shooting were six women and two men.
Three people survived, including a woman who received a chilling message from the shooter.
"Her
life was spared, and (she was) told, 'I'm not going to kill you, I'm
going to spare you, so you can tell them what happened'," Dot Scott,
president of the Charleston unit of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), told CNN.
Scott said she heard this from the victims' family members.
The NAACP is a civil rights organisation for ethnic minorities in the US.
According to Atlantic weekly, the shooting spree in Charleston was the latest assault on black churches for generations.
Black
churches have suffered at the hands of thugs and terrorists throughout
the Civil Rights era, as they had for a century before.
On
September 15, 1963, Klu Klux Klan terrorists bombed the 16th Street
Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four girls, it recalled.
As recently as the 1990s, a wave of fire-bombings hit black churches.
The Atlantic identified at least eight black churches in South Carolina alone that suffered probable arson attacks.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])