As a retired MD, I had previously learned that to halt a disease you need to eliminate the disease-vector. I agree that we don't know how to eliminate paranoid hatred, and that banning flags is a weak gesture. And of course, you feel that reducing access to bullets and firearms would be closer to a workable solution for the problem.

No, if you read him carefully, what he's saying here (sarcastically) is "Yeah, let's blame massacres on political symbols and groups we don't like instead of, you know, the guys who actually committed them! That's sure going to solve our problems!"

For decades, the liberals have decided that intentions are more important than performance. Thus the appalling rate of illiteracy, illegitimacy, and crime among the lower economic classes of all colors. But the programs were all begun with "good intentions". I don't even buy that, but assume they at least meant what they said, 50 some years ago. That is why this punk is chastised for his "hate" rather than for pulling the trigger on a group of people. That is why the blame falls on the NRA or Glock, or the "gun culture", rather than Dylann or whatever his name is. If we must disarm to prevent violence, why is violence itself unpunished? There is a fellow here in Metro Kansas City who is getting frequent press with his racist diatribes, all duly reported by the media. He killed three people near a Jewish cultural center and by a Jewish run nursing home. Had that murder taken place six blocks away at a shopping mall or across the State Line in the inner city, it would have garnered scant attention on the news and Attorney General Eric Holder would not have attended the funerals. When you mark some killings as especially heinous, you automatically classify other homicides as some how less significant, which means those victims are less important to society. Au Contraire hit this one right on the nose. Symbolically, anyway.

Good for you, Patrick! A Glock 41 certainly cannot fire itself and the NRA doesn't force anyone to buy a firearm. Gun bans don't work and undermine individual rights protected by the Constitution. DOJ should do a better job of background checks. But then again, people lie on the forms all the time. No easy solution. In the end, it comes down to accountability of the shooter. He wasn't insane as he premeditated all this race hatred and murder and then executed his plan as intended. The flag was just a motivator for the shooter to go on a one man self tour of the sites of Confederate soldiers and of Antebellum South slavery. It reaffirmed his warped view of history and gave him courage to think Gray enough to walk into a black church and start firing. A sad affair indeed...

If the victims are dead, it doesn’t matter whether their murder is a “hate crime” or a “love crime.” For as long as there have been laws, murder has been against the law. With or without hate crime legislation, the perpetrator of this heartbreaking insanity should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Well said, Patrick.