Three Paths To Murder
The gunman who killed a man and wounded two other people (see entry titled “The Angel Is A Coward“) gave himself up to police and is reported to now be under suicide watch. He may be suicidal because he is sorry for what he has done but I doubt it. I suspect he is feeling suicidal because no matter how tough he gets things still don’t go the way he wants them to.
The media reports his gang, Hell’s Angel’s, turned their backs on him to protect themselves from becoming the target of a social witch-hunt. He was a new recruit and they did not feel he was worthy of their loyalty after bringing that much heat down on them so soon. They got their lawyer to inform police he would not be acting for the gunman then supplied him with a different lawyer who negotiated terms for his surrender.
His parents publicly stated they would turn him in if he came to them. Maybe they meant it and maybe they just said it to prevent themselves from becoming the target of people wanting to avenge the death of a hero!
Pack rats don’t deal very well with being alone so he has fallen apart.
I have said it before in my entry titled “Cultural Cringe” but I will say it again – people who run in packs are 100 percent frightened cowards! They rely on their idiot mates to back them up and keep them safe because they are afraid to fight their own battles.
How does a boy grow up like that?
There are three possible ways that spring to mind for me.
Scenario One.
He is a psychopath. I am ruling this one out because psychopaths do not call their parents to say they love them and they are sorry when they kill someone. They EXPECT their parents to understand and go to the wall to protect them if necessary. The parents of a psychopath would be too afraid of what their son would do to them to ever say they would turn him in!
Scenario Two.
He grew up in a violent home. He watched dad beat up on mum and learned that the one with the biggest muscles has all the power. He adopted his father’s “Might makes right” attitude and went out into the world afraid of his father and anyone like him. He was determined to be the one who hits not the one who is hit. Everything he did from then on was designed to help him cope with the permanent, chronic, fear that violence at home instills in children who grow up in such unsafe environments.
Due to his violent tendencies he would not have been welcome in civilized company and would have had no option but to mix with others like himself. There he would have met with more violence and discovered his muscles were not big enough and he was not tough enough to feel safe. His fear of his father would have transferred over onto those who were more violent and “tougher” than him and that would have prompted him to get even more violent himself.
People like this literally live according to the supposedly humorous: “Yea though I walk through the valley of death I will fear no evil because I am the toughest son-of-a-bitch in the valley!” Unfortunately for them if they think they are NOT the toughest son-of-a-bitch in the valley they live in constant fear.
One article about this man quotes someone as saying he had a mean streak even before he got into drugs. That’s the next step. To become a cold-blooded hero killer you can’t afford to have a conscience and drugs are a good way to kill one if you have it.
Once you have lost your conscience you become nothing more than a human animal and human animals run scared of the rest of society. Human animals are targets for justice so they tend to end up in jail and he did end up in jail.
In jail he met the creme-de-la-creme of violence, the ultimate “toughest sons-of-bitches” and discovered his only hope of really being tough was to run with a powerful pack of other human animals. There is, after all, safety in numbers so he joined a pack.
Once he was in the pack he probably felt as safe as anyone living in the underworld of crime and violence can ever feel. He probably thought nothing could touch him until he realised there was another pack of human animals who were even tougher than his own. He decided to swap packs and only then did he learn just how weak he really still was.
His old pack shot him. Twice. They taught him there is something tougher than him and even tougher than his pack – guns.
He got himself a gun and thought he was now at the top of the heap. He was in the toughest pack, was physically tough himself, had no conscience and was “packing heat”. He probably thought he was finally safe.
The law couldn’t touch him – his pack would protect him from them. Society couldn’t touch him – he was someone they feared. Other violent people would not touch him for fear of what he and his pack would do to them so he felt as safe as any child growing up with violence can ever feel.
Safe enough to do to women in public what his father probably always did to his mother in the privacy of their home.
Then a man tried to do what, as a small child, he probably tried to do – stop the violence and he did what his father probably always did until he learned not to interfere – punished him.
That was when the world of his childhood came face to face with the real world and all his illusions, all his poor training, all his mistaken beliefs came to light.
Suddenly the whole world is saying he is not the toughest son-of-a-bitch in the valley after all but scum on the pond of life.
Suddenly he is being told it is NOT all right to beat up on women and it is not all right to punish people who try to stop that behaviour. He is probably wondering where these people who are calling the dead man a hero were when HE was trying to stop his father from beating up on his mother.
Suddenly his pack is saying the same thing – it’s actually wrong to beat up on women. They are saying the men who tried to stop him had a right to do that and are hero’s. They are saying he had no right to punish them. They are telling him he crossed the line by doing in public what is only acceptable to do in the company of other women-beaters or in private.
I suspect he cannot believe they are cutting him loose for what he would see as the smallest crime he ever committed. He knows they would have protected him if he had just killed HER! He would have expected them to stand by him for killing a man who interfered with his right to beat up on her.
What would have really broken him, I think however, would have been hearing his father condemn his actions too. His world would have turned upside down to hear the man who TAUGHT him it was OK to beat up on women, and punish anyone who tried to interfere, publicly say it was not OK after all.
Scenario Three.
The third possible way for a boy to turn into a man like this is drugs. Drugs can turn a nice boy into a monster with no conscience and no other option but to fit into the criminal underworld any way they have to.
My Theory
I believe scenario two is how this particular man went from innocent boy to cold-blooded hero killer. There are two clues that make me believe this is the most likely path he took to become who he is today.
The first clue is the media description of the beating he dished out to another woman. That beating was filmed and his actions towards the woman were the actions of a man who does not even really think women are human. It is rare for a man to develop that great a contempt for women unless there is no respect in them for their mother. The only way a man can ever learn to really despise his mother to this degree is if he sees her be treated, and accept being treated, as non-human. A man can, of course, grow up to hate women because of the way his mother acts but there is a subtle difference between the two scenarios.
This man dragged both of the women he assaulted by their hair. This is one of the favourite behaviours in domestic violence because it really communicates to the victim just how much of a non-person she is. Even men who hate women tend to love their hair and will not abuse THAT part of a woman but men who don’t see women as human abuse them in every way possible.
The second clue is, as mentioned above, someone who knew him before he got into drugs said he had a mean streak even before drugs entered the picture. That indicates to me that he didn’t turn into a violent dog because of drugs – he already was one and drugs just made him worse.
The saddest thing of all, if I am correct in how this all came about, is this man’s father would have backed down if a hero like the man his son killed had confronted HIM when he was beating his wife. His mother would not be the mother of a despicable hero killer if she had left his father to protect her son’s sense of security as soon as the violence began either.
Three children would still have a father, a hero would not be dead and this man would not be trying to kill himself if he had known all along that you can be safe without being violent!
He has lived a life of violence because deep inside he is still a child filled with fear. A little boy with a gun running like a coward from those who might hurt him the way his father used to hurt people. Like the frightened little boy he really still is he surrendered when his father and his gangland father figures ordered him to.
I could be completely wrong about him and how he came to be the way he is, of course, but that is how I think this tragedy came about.
