Fresh Memories Of A Massacre Haunt South Carolina's Background Check Debate

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- In Marion Square on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, relatives of those who were killed at the Emanuel AME Church around the corner last June held each other and sobbed.  

The three Democratic presidential candidates, who had debated gun safety legislation just two blocks away the previous night, had departed for Columbia, the state capital, early in the morning. Most of the reporters who had descended upon the city for the debate followed. But the Mother Emanuel survivors, along with the relatives of other shootings, had come to honor their loved ones and question the inevitability of gun violence. They weren’t alone in their grief: Charleston’s mayor, a state representative, gun safety advocates, various pastors and a survivor of domestic violence reassured them that they all were, as King said, “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” The rally’s speakers expressed a determination to prevent future tragedies.