Flags and Guns: Change Versus Inertia

In this photograph which Dylann Roof posted on his personal Web site he holds two powerful and destructive objects.
In this photograph, which Dylann Roof posted on his personal Web site, he holds two powerful and destructive objects.

Having already written a couple of posts about the aftermath of the Charleston shootings, I’ll keep this one brief. The picture above shows Dylann Roof, the alleged shooter, posing with an object that many Americans associate with hatred and violence, but many other Americans venerate.

I’m referring to the gun Roof is holding in his right hand—a semiautomatic .45-calibre Glock 41 handgun that was one of a line originally designed for the Austrian military and now used by police forces around the world, including many in the United States. According to news reports, Roof bought the pistol on April 11th, eight days after his twenty-first birthday, at Shooter’s Choice, a gun store in West Columbia, South Carolina. Despite the fact that Roof was arrested earlier this year on a minor drug charge, the purchase appears to have been perfectly legal. The Glock 41 sells for about six hundred and thirty-five dollars. A particular favorite of gun enthusiasts, it is accurate, relatively light, and easy to reload.

In his left hand, Roof is holding what to many Americans is another symbol of hatred and inhumanity: a small Confederate flag.* In the wake of his killing spree, a movement has arisen across the South to ban the display of the flag in public places. In South Carolina on Tuesday, the state assembly voted to extend the legislative session in order to debate taking it down from the grounds of the state capitol. In Maryland, Virginia, and Tennessee, elected officials have vowed to remove the image of the flag from license plates. In Mississippi, the Times reported, Philip Gunn, the Republican speaker of the state’s House, called for removing the Confederate battle cross from the state’s flag. “As a Christian,” Gunn said, “I believe our state’s flag has become a point of offense that needs to be removed.” And on Wednesday morning, Alabama removed the flag from its capitol grounds.

Surely, these are all positive developments. If white Southerners want to celebrate their heritage by flying the Confederate flag on their lawns and wearing Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirts, that is their business. But displaying in public spaces what Republican senator Rand Paul on Tuesday called “inescapably a symbol of human bondage and slavery” is a very different matter. As the body of the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, the pastor of Emanuel A.M.E. Church and a state senator, lies in state at the capitol in Columbia, it is outrageous that the Confederate flag will still be flying nearby.

But what about banning the Glock and other deadly weapons—or, at least, restricting them to rifle ranges and other secure areas? Where is the national movement to do this? About the only meaningful movement we’ve seen is an effort by Democratic senator Joe Manchin and Republican senator Pat Toomey to revive the expanded background-check legislation that the Senate killed in 2013. But nothing is imminent, Toomey told the Washington Post.

Evidently, the American political system still has the capacity to rouse itself and restrict the display of offensive flags. Unfortunately, doing anything about guns, which kill more than thirty thousand people a year in the U.S., is still beyond the nation.

*This post has been altered to correct a reference to the Confederate flag.