Last August, the Roswell Police Department fired an officer for flying the Confederate flag. On Monday, a Georgia judge sentenced two other flag-wavers to more than a decade of prison time each. Neither incident is related to protections under the First Amendment. But both incidents are related to the guns owned by Dylan Roof.

The Roswell police officer said that she didn’t realize that some found the flag to be offensive. By her incredible statement, she thinks that flying the flag doesn’t make a negative statement of any sort. She also said the flag had been flying from her house for over a year.

About a year places the flag on the house just about the time that racist Dylan Roof shot and killed nine people at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal church, home to the oldest black congregation in the Old South.

The judge, who sentenced the two far more aggressive flag-wavers to decades in prison, declared the duo committed a hate crime during their flag-waving and drinking convoy. The judge went one step further. He questioned why the 15 members of the flag-waving convoy weren’t arrested by police but driven away from the crime scene with the protection of the police. The judge said the flag-waving confrontations were connected to the Charleston shootings using the phrase, not “an accident.”

Both the unthinking police officer’s flag displays and the drunken, terrorist convoy celebrated the gunsmoke in Charleston, not the cannon smoke at the Battle of Fort Sumter. These Georgia flag-wavers were celebrating Roof’s blazing guns and the deaths of nine innocent people.

Michael Parker
Flowery Branch

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