Is there such a thing a bad person? When you examine the
lives of those people who commit horrible crimes, Mark Anthony Conditt, the
Austin Bomber, Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland shooter, Stephen Paddock, who
committed the Las Vegas massacre which, with 58 deaths, made it the worst mass
shooting in US history, Omar Mateen, the 29 year old security guard who was
responsible for the murder of 49 at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Adam Lanza
who shot 20 children at the Sandy Hook School in Newton Connecticut and Devin
Patrick Kelley who was responsible for 26 deaths at the Sutherland Springs
Baptist church outside San Antonio, you're more likely to think of mental
illness than you are to make a moral judgment. If you're someone who lost
loved ones in any of these tragedies or in say 9/11, you might not be
interested in an analysis of motive. If the perpetrator had not only died at
his or someone else’s hands you're either the kind of person who finds solace
in justice, which means having the guilty person pay (perhaps with his or her
life) or not. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber was sentenced to life imprisonment in
a Super maximum security prison which ended the threat he posed, but it’s hard
to get one’s hands around whether he was or is the embodiment of evil. Are rats evil? Certainly the terrorists whose violence is committed in the name of millenarian
ideologies seem closer to what might be called evil simply due to their
indifference to human life. A terrorist with a reasoning mind seems worse than
a person who's hearing voices. Maybe one way to look at serial killers is the
way one does hurricanes and other natural disasters. In the way that global warming
has caused environmental catastrophes like the melting of polar ice caps, so
too genetic, social and psychological factors get unleashed which make innocent
babies turn into bombers. Remember the famous scene from Alfred Hitchock’s
Sabotage (1936) based on Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent about political extremism, in which a young boy is
unwittingly turned into a bomber? How prescient the filmmaker turned out to be?
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