Understanding The Lone Gunman
June 13, 2009 / 4:03 pm • By Dr. Melissa ClouthierThere’s lots of blaming going on for the Holocaust Museum shooting. Just look at my comment section. So nice to see the freaks come out of the shadows.
Here’s been my experience with the haters: they might have different political bents but the genesis of their rage is the same. It begins with discontent–a discontent we all feel by the way. We see some wrong and injustice and want to do something, but the size and scope of the problem seems overwhelming. At this point, there are two choices: Do what we can do or nurse our helpless rage.
Killers end up in the latter category. They nurse an injustice and plot revenge. That is, they don’t exactly channel their anger constructively. They decide to take matters in their own hands.
It’s the same whether it’s the guy who kills the woman who leaves him. It’s the same for the white supremacist killing Holocaust Museum guards. It’s the same for home-grown Jihadists bent on bringing down America. It’s the same for the psychopathic murderer. It’s the same for the gang banger taking revenge over a turf violation.
A murderer completely justifies his hate. He nurses it.
A murderer also dehumanizes his opposition. He has to. The enemy deserves the death because he’s earned it. The murderer is justified because the victim had it coming. Always.
Fundamentally, the reasoning goes like this, “that person, group, association, idea doesn’t care about me, why should I care about him or it?” So the Virginia Tech killer can murder the world because the world abandoned him. Ditto the guys who were bullied. Ditto the white supremacist. Ditto the Jihadis.
Nursed grievances and the bitterness that results + Dehumanizing the “enemy” = Murderous Rage Resulting in Murder
When the murderers survive their ordeal and they’re interviewed, there’s a reason why they have no remorse: they believe they are completely justified in their action. Often, they’ve spent a lot of mind time building up their reasons why a certain person or group of people deserve to die. They keep lists.
Noticeably absent from their hate lists is a list of wrongs they themselves have committed that hurt others. That is, they completely lack self-awareness.
Anyone who has spent time on this earth has either purposely or accidentally hurt another person. Most of us, in our hearts, know this. We recognize our own cruelty and feel guilty and ashamed for our pettiness, meanness and smallness of spirit. This is good. This self-awareness serves as inhibition for taking justice into our own hands. Heaven forbid all the people we’ve neglected or overtly harmed put us on a list, right?
When the Pharisees brought the woman caught in adultery to Jesus, they wanted to stone her. He wrote in the dirt and said, “Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone.” This is part of the underpinning of American justice. We don’t just drag people we feel have wronged us, or society, out and stone them. We have a system of justice that tries them based on evidence and we all live with the decision of that justice. This is the rule of law.
Murderers invariably view themselves as tools of justice, no matter how sick and demented. The world is cruel to children anyway, they’re better off dead–any molester, murderer or mother who drowns her children goes down this warped thinking path.
It takes a long rationalizing road to finally murder. That’s why rehabilitation rarely works. Nothing short of a lightning strike on the road to Damascus and the resulting blindness seems to get the attention of people bent on imposing their form of justice. Since that sort of jolt of awareness is only in God’s capability, prison and the death sentence for these people seem the best decision for a society that needs to be free of this malignancy.
The finger pointing about the recent murders is silly. The root cause is the same and the cover for the killings is ideology, The truth is that the murderers would find some way to nurse their grievances–that is, they were inclined to be angry, they just needed to find a group that could reflect and feed their hate. And there are no shortage of groups to do just that.
