@lakewashington:
That raises an interesting question that I personally don’t think has a solid answer, and that is for someone to commit a crime like this do they necessarily have to be mentally ill? The law as far as I know, for example, doesn’t necessarily accept that a person was mentally ill and in effect absolve them of the crime (obviously, they would hopefully be put away if found innocent by reason of insanity), but for example in this case, is hate itself a mental illness? The fact that one hates can lead a person to do unmentionable things, but in the end, does that mean when they do the crime they aren’t culpable, or is it they are culpable because even though they hated so deeply, they knew darn well what they were doing was wrong and simply fed into the hate?
I personally find the claim that anyone who kills is mentally ill to be simplistic at its worst, in large part because crimes like this one are not based in logic, but rather in emotions, and letting emotions get the best of you is not a mental illness. If Roof claimed to hear voices telling him to kill members of a black church, that would be mental illness at work, or if he assumed for some reason they meant to do him harm, you could argue that; but hatred of the kind he had is not mental illness to me, someone who hates like that has simply let his emtions take over and stopped thinking in a sense and I think branding him as mentally ill simply because (as I assume from reading about the case) he hated blacks that much trivializes both murder, and also doesn’t do anything to help the mentally ill, not the least which being that this will lead to the idea that mentally ill people=homocide, when it doesn’t in most cases. Basically it is a cop out for any would be hater, kills a bunch of people, then have a lawyer claim that they hated because they had a bad past, were under the influence of someone, etc and therefore were ‘mentally ill’.