racism are not the same thing.

The shooter was a racist.

for his birthday if he was mentally ill? His father is just as guilty as he is.

I think that there is more than one problem going on here: mental illness may be one of the issues, but there will always be mentally ill people. And there are certainly a load of racists in the US. We can work on those issues through societal norms and values.

But there is something we can do immediately: make sure guns are not easily accessible. We have proven ourselves as a society incapable of handling the freedom a lack of gun control gives us. We use that freedom to kill each other. We obviously need the confines of gun control until we are responsible enough to use it wisely. Like a child who must be monitored with scissors.

kill others?

loser within society at large..no sound accomplishments or goals for his age.
Pair that with his gun lust, he exploded.

The claim, though, is often made.

Sometimes it's just difficulty at accepting that people can be really evil. They can be.

Sometimes it's just empathy. Better to be mentally ill than morally depraved. Better to have a mentally ill child than one that was raised in a way that promoted or allowed him to be morally depraved. I sympathize with this, but at some point the facts just have to be accepted. Kids go bad; some kids are born bad.

Sometimes it's just difficulty at accepting that somebody you think of or who others will think of as being a group representative can be evil. Your group is never and must never be thought of as harboring an evil person. The answer to this is to kick that person out of your group and no longer defend him as a product of what others did to him; form a common bond with other groups in firmly opposing all such criminals, and in turn demote or decry group members that defend miscreants--and make sure that others who insist on lumping the bad guys in with your group have no justification for it. (This is a royal pain to start off with, and can lead to a kind of intra-community war and breakdown. So be it.)

Most violence is not done by mentally ill people, unless we really want to expand the definition. But some especially egregious examples *are* done by mentally ill people. It doesn't make anything better by acknowledging that the mentally ill or at least mentally troubled sometimes latch onto some idea in popular culture: Whether that the US is intentionally seeking to kill Muslims (Hasan), that police are involved in a war against African-Americans (Brinsley). Yet often that's what we see done--"mentally ill" defends not just the person but also the family or group. In-groups that engage in this behavior often project that practice onto other groups that don't.

As for Roof, for now it's speculation, and speculation is free. Those who need to believe he's mentally ill will do so regardless of expert opinion. There are likewise those who insist Lanza isn't mentally ill because they need him to just be evil, even though his diagnosis long precedes his slaughter.

However, to dispose of every theme or idea in society that might provide impetus to some hateful incident is quite insane on its face. Some like this idea, but they are often neurotic (not in the DSM definition, but the popular usage); but they like short-term security and are willing to sacrifice long-term freedom for it.

Admit it. There are hatemongers who want to start a race war. This latest asshole was one of them. Don't blame mental illness for the most heinous things that hatemongers do. Blame the hatemongers for being hatemongers. Most mentally ill people are against that horrid crap. Yet, we get lumped in with those assholes. I'm sick of hearing it.