Virginia shooter and destructive payback psychology

https://gma.yahoo.com/virginia-shooting-suspect-vester-flanagan-did-leading-air-213449674--abc-news-topstories.html#

Like the shooting of NYC cops after Ferguson, if this violence is tied to race and Charleston, it blows my mind. I wonder what these shooters want for their legacy, or what they want the public to take away from their crimes. Maybe Flanagan's manifesto will shed some light, but his atrocious actions pretty much invalidate anything insightful he may have written.

Although racial violence is still vastly disproportionately black victims and white perpetrators, events like this may just perpetuate the stereotype that young black men are all thugs and the black people you work with are unstable and could go off on you any moment. Those perceptions of course do great daily harm to African Americans as a whole - even if it's mostly subtle aggressions that are imperceptible to non-blacks.

I suppose there is a fixation in the American psyche (or human nature in general) about getting payback and taking matters into our own hands. If others have hurt you or those you associate with, how is it is "justice" to commit violence against totally unrelated people who just happen to be of the same broad, arbitrary social category or geography? When Hamas sends some rockets into Israel, why does the IDF bomb and bulldoze homes and hospitals full of women and kids who never touched a rocket? Does that make them feel better, or feel safer? Of the 45M blacks in the US, did Roof think that killing 9 would "set things right" for Obama being president and all the other terrible things blacks have done to whites? And then Flanagan killing 2 whites 300 miles away from SC somehow settles that score too? Obviously this lunacy never ends, so such beliefs should never materialize into action in the first place.