After mass shootings, United States politicians normally observe an unofficial period of grace before they address their broader causes.
Not this time. After an atrocity that struck at the confluence of two modern US nightmares - racial hatred and mass killings - an angry and stricken President Obama addressed both issues just an hour after the suspect was captured.
"I've had to make statements like this too many times," he said.
"Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times. We don't have all the facts but we do know that once again innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.
"Now is the time for mourning and for healing. But let's be clear. At some point we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.
"It doesn't happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it."
Nor did the President shy away from the terrible news that the crime appeared to have been committed by a young white man driven by racial hatred who targeted not only a black place of worship, but one so significant in the struggle against slavery and for civil rights.
Charleston police arrested and charged alleged gunman Dylann Roof, who was found at a traffic stop in a city in the neighbouring state of North Carolina. Roof had reportedly been given a gun by his father on his 21st birthday in April.
Images of Roof circulated online show him wearing a jacket with a patch from apartheid-era South Africa, as well as one from white-ruled Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
"There's something particularly heartbreaking about a death happening in a place in which we seek solace and we seek peace," Obama said.
"In a place of worship. Mother Emanuel is in fact more than a church. This is a place of worship that was founded by African-Americans seeking liberty.
"This is a church that was burned to the ground because its worshippers worked to end slavery. When there were laws banning all-black church gatherings they conducted services in secret.
"When there was a non-violent movement to bring our country in line with our highest ideals, some of our brightest leaders spoke and led marches from this church's steps," he said.
Even before President Obama made his statement at the White House, and before the suspect had been captured, the politics of race and guns had become part of the public conversation.
On a Fox News morning program guests and hosts lamented that the slain pastor, Reverend Clementa Pinckney, a 41-year-old father of two and state senator, had not been armed so he could better protect worshippers.
Meanwhile on social media a new generation of civil rights activists, born of a string of shootings of African-Americans by police, wondered where it might be safe to be black in the US if not in a black church.
It is impossible to say how the debates prompted by this atrocity will play out, but for those who have closely observed the politics of gun control in the US over recent years it is hard to believe it will prompt change.
When he travelled to Sandy Hook just before Christmas in 2012 to speak with a village that had lost 26 primary school children and staff, Obama said: "This is our first task - caring for our children. It's our first job.
"If we don't get that right, we don't get anything right. That's how, as a society, we will be judged."
Later he proposed a string of gun control measures, mainly aimed at broadening background checks rather than banning weapons.
Some states drafted their laws.
Those measures mostly failed.
State and federal legislatures - terrified of a National Rifle Association backlash - voted them down, often despite overwhelming popular support.
In many cases the politicians cast their votes as the parents of the dead children watched on, weeping quietly in the public galleries.
