A Fox News pundit has blamed society’s acceptance of transgender people for the deaths of nine people in a mass shooting.

21-year-old Dylann Roof was arrested on Thursday in Shelby, North Carolina, on suspicion of the murder of nine people at a historically black church in Charleston.

Roof’s roommate said he often went on tirades against African Americans “taking over the world” and had a desire to ignite “a civil war” – but a Fox News ‘expert’ has a different theory.

Pundit Erick Erickson dismissed claims that gun control would prevent deaths – and claimed that by accepting trans people, liberals are ignoring the “real evil” and allowing mental health problems to grow.

He said: “As a nation, when these things happen, we never have the conversation about real evil. We also never have the conversation about mental health.

“Instead, we descend into partisan conversations where everything is political and neither side can concede or acknowledge the other’s points. Everyone and everything gets blamed while ignoring the actual person who killed.

“I realize now why that is. I realize why we will never have the conversation we should have.

“A society that looks at a 65 year old male Olympian and, with a straight face, declares him a her and ‘a new normal’ cannot have a conversation about mental health or evil because that society no longer distinguishes normal from crazy and evil from good.

“Our American society has a mental illness – overwhelming narcissism and delusion – and so cannot recognize what crazy or evil looks like.”

Erickson continues to appear regularly on Fox News despite a string of deeply concerning comments.

In February, he compared gay rights to mass-murdering terrorists Islamic State, writing: “The divide between Islamic extremists and gay rights extremists is at death. They meet on the line at destruction.”

His website also carried a column claiming that NFL player Michael Sam and his fiancé should go to Iraq and confront ISIS instead of demanding equal rights.

He has also previously claimed that the US government is spending money on researching “fat lesbians” instead of trying to cure Ebola.