There are clearly crazed people who go for the thrill of the kill with maximum shock value. Columbine, Aurora, and Sandy Hook are the first ones that come to mind. This man is in another category, a category that has law enforcement across the nation on edge, rightwing extremism. There are a lot more just like him still out there. If you remember back in 2009 The DHS issued a report on rightwing extremism and the Right went absolutely ape**** calling it an Obama DHS hit job against all things Conservative while failing to mention that the report was commissioned by the George Bush administration.
A recent survey of law enforcement agencies nationwide found that police consider right-wing attacks like last week's mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina to be a greater threat than Islamic extremism. The survey, conducted last year by Charles Kurzman and David Shanzer of Duke University, in collaboration with the Police Executive Research Forum, found that 74 percent of law enforcement agencies ranked anti-government extremism among the top three terror threats they faced.
By contrast, threats linked to groups like al-Qaeda registered at that same level among only 39 percent of the 382 agencies surveyed.
In an op-ed published in The New York Times just a day before the Charleston shooting, Kurzman and Shanzer wrote that counterterrorism officials at 19 law enforcement agencies maintained in recent follow-up interviews that they were more concerned about the threat of right-wing extremism than the threat of Islamic extremism.
I applaud Walmart, South Carolina, and possibly Mississippi for finally making the long overdue move to rid themselves of the Confederate flag, it's a start.