In Cold Blood Truman Capote recounts thirty-three-year-old Richard Hickock and thirty-six-year-old Perry Smith’s, November 15, 1959, slaughter of Kansas farmer Herbert “Herb” Clutter, his wife Bonnie, daughter Nancy, and son Kenyon. Comments Capote attributes to the killers suggest why some young men murder total strangers. Smith called, “(Mr. Clutter) a very nice gentleman. Soft spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” One of the pair explained, “Somebody had to pay.”
Pay for what?
In a Dalas, Texas, motorcade, November 22, 1963, twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy.
On a balcony of Memphis, Tennessee’s Lorayne Motel, April 4, 1968, forty-year-old James Earl Ray assassinated the Reverand Martin Luther King Jr.
In the kitchen of Las Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel, June 5, 1968, twenty-
four-year-old Sarhan Sarhan assassinated Robert F. Kennedy.
At Colorado’s Columbine High School, April 20, 1999, eighteen-year-old Eric Harris and seventeen-year-old Dylan Klebold massacred12 students and 1 teacher.
At Newtown, Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary, December 14, 2012, twenty-year-old Adam Lanze shot to death twenty, six- and seven-year-olds and six adults.
Shooting from the 37th floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, October 1, 2017, sixty-four-year-old Steven Paddock killed 60 and wounded over 400 at the Route 91 Harvest music festival.
At Parkland Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Valentine’s Day, 2018, nineteen-year-old Nickolas Cruz murdered 17 and injured 17 students.
At a Buffalo, New York, Tops Market, May 14,2022, eighteen-year-old Payton Gendron murdered 10 and wounded 3 African Americans.
At Uvalde, Texas’s, Robb Elementary School, May 24, 2022, eighteen-year- old Salvador Ramos murdered nineteen students and two teachers, and wounded 17 others.
At a Highland Park, Illinois, 2022 Independence Day parade twenty-one-year-old Robert Eugene Cremo III killed 7 and wounded 47.
At Buttler Pennsylvania’s Farm Show Grounds, July 13, 2024, a round from twenty-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks’s AR-15-style rifle snipped the top from former President Donald J. Trump’s right ear.
It is natural to look for the roots of these men’s acts in ethics and philosophy, in Democrat/Republican, Liberal/Conservative politics. I believe their motive is far more gut-level! These men are Losers! And they know it!
In Fate’s game of Monopoly, Richard Hickock, Perry Smith and the rest will never own a hotel on Boardwalk or penthouse above Park Place; not even a shack on Baltic Avenue. These men are condemned to humanity’s dustbin. And they know, hate, and resent it!
A High School Annual never labeled Richard Hickock or Perry Smith, “Most likely to succeed.” Erik Harris and Dylan Klebold had not hope of being voted “Most Popular.” Adam Lanza or Nikolas Cruz would never be elected Student Body President. Payton Gendron or Salvador Ramos never dreamed of being Homecoming King. Robert E. Crimo III may have fantasized seducing a High School Princess, but he knew it was out of the question. Friendless and “bullied, Thomas Matthew Crooks felt fated to empty bedpans, wipe asses, and change diapers in a nursing home.
Today, the faces of these friendless, fearful, furious young men eclipse all others in the Yearbooks. They are Mass Murderers!
Age and the magnitude of his massacre seem to make Paddock an outlier. Did his act derive from the same irrational Rage as the younger shooters?
I’ll wrap this up by citing Erich Fromm. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness this renowned social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher argues that men need to “make a dent.” If nowhere else, they sometimes make it “in someone’s head.“
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