Guilty

WELL, HERE WE GO AGAIN. Some very angry, unhappy male walks into a public place, and goes on a shooting spree. Females never do it. At least, not yet. Don't count 'em out, though. Females, in their own very special way, are every bit as angry and vicious as males. Someday, somewhere, a woman will become a random mass murderer. Bonnie Parker was not an isolated case.

Every year in the united states approximately twenty random mass murders take the lives of one hundred to two hundred innocent people. The other fifteen to twenty thousand annual american murders are discernably motivated, perpetrated against specifically targeted individuals.

By the time the monster was about halfway finished, rush limbaugh was predicting that liberal democrats would politicize the event, thus politicizing the event. Limbaugh the analyst. Limbaugh the expert. Limbaugh the opportunisitc politicizer of tragedy.

If nobody had a gun, nobody would ever get killed with a gun. The country is far safer, say the conservatives, because of the tens of millions of guns in america. guns protect people, and prevent other people from using guns to commit murders. Had all the school children in connecticut been packing heat, or if even one of the teachers in the right place had been packing heat, say the conservatives, one of them would have stopped the killing before it ever got started.

There is a pattern. The mass murderer is a loner, who has failed repeatedly in various of life's pursuits, suffers from depression and alienation, and plans mass murder meticulously, well in advance.

It probably doesn't matter whether people have guns. There would probably be mass murders by other means. The second amendment supporters are probably correct. In a country where firearms are plentiful, there is no such thing as restricted access.

In his best selling classic "In Cold Blood" Truman Capote told the true story of two angry alienated men who murder the clutter family in kansas in the late nineteen fifties, and got away with about fifty dollars. Capote did not believe in individual guilt. He believed is collective, societal guilt.

We all participate in, and thus help create, the world in which we live. It may be that few people who read the book understand capote's essential message, but the message is there. The easiest answer is to divide the world into "good people" and "bad people", and to ignore the obvious fact that we are all a little bit of both.

In the twentieth century more than one hundred million gang murders, called war, are still celebrated by us all. When we all contribute to murder, we erect momuments to the murders that we all are. Most murderers are called heros. I have never killed anyone, but I am a killer, because I pay other people, people I call the military, to kill. I plead guilty. My sentence is life, and death, in this world.