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Bob Wooten: Wolves that live among us
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We're told to love thy neighbor, and that's always seemed like good advice.
In fact, it's been pretty easy counsel to follow. No matter where I've lived over the years, I've been lucky to have wonderful people living just across the fence.
I can only wonder what it's like to wake up one morning and learn that the wolf has been living next door.
Of course, I mean the wolf who walks on two legs, who goes off to work each morning and mows the lawn on the weekends.
To the neighbors, he seems perfectly normal. He's the quiet type. Keeps mostly to himself.
We never dreamed he was a predator.
No doubt, that's what people in his neighborhood are thinking this morning about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist who turned a building at Fort Hood, Texas, into a slaughterhouse on Thursday. Thirteen were killed and 29 wounded after Hasan opened fire on troops at the Soldier Readiness Center on the base.
He only stopped shooting when a civilian police officer returned fire, wounding Hasan and leaving him hospitalized.
Investigators are trying to determine what triggered his deadly spree. Was it terrorism? Mental illness? Religious fanaticism?
Meanwhile, the rest of us are left peering through one more tear in the fabric of society, catching yet another glimpse of the wolves that haunt our imagination. That fabric, woven largely on mutual trust, seems more tattered by the day.
Consider a case closer to home: The September slayings in Farmville of a college professor, her estranged husband, their teenage daughter and a girl who was visiting.
The murders were allegedly committed by a California rapper, a guest who shared an interest with the two girls in a music genre called "horrorcore," which glorifies rape and murder.
Investigators have described a grisly scene at the house, which is located in one of the town's older, more upscale neighborhoods -- where no one expected the darkest corner of the human soul to be exposed.
Consider another case even closer to home: The June shooting deaths here in the Northern Shenandoah Valley of Gregory Scott Slater Jr. and Kayleigh Marie Plamondon. Justin Slater, Greg Slater's younger brother and Plamondon's ex-boyfriend, is charged with the murders. Investigators say he shot Greg Slater at his Frederick County home and Plamondon at a Clarke County residence where she was house-sitting.
The lawyers are still debating whether Justin Slater is sane enough to stand trial for the deaths. There's probably no such uncertainty in the neighborhoods where the shootings happened. Ask anyone and they'll tell you. Crazy things like this don't happen here.
These three very different cases share one common thread: A deadly breach of trust that leaves all of us wondering if any more wolves are in the fold.
* Bob Wooten is the managing editor of the Daily. Contact him at 800-296-5137 or at <a href="mailto:bwooten@nvdaily.com">bwooten@nvdaily.com</a>.
Thinking about the series of mass murders over the last twenty years, I'm afraid what comes to mind is: "Get used to it." What with the Post Office shootings (which even gave a new term to English--"going postal"), the school shootings, the business shootings, and now Fort Hood, they have become a fact of life. One of the commonalities is that the targets are large groups of people with no way to protect themselves.
One answer always trotted out is that guns be removed from the citizenry. I'm afraid that genie is out of the bottle. There are presently too many firearms out there to be successfully confiscated. While some politicians and various pressure groups constantly call for such action, they're not the guys who have to confront the probably irate gun owners. I'm inclined to think we really don't want to go there.
It is notable that these sort of attacks are rare where concealed-carry laws exist. This may mean nothing, but one wonders.
The problem seems more with the creature pulling the trigger rather than the firearm itself. Why do people kill their non-threatening fellows? One thing that often jumps out in the background of the shooters is their isolation. They're usually described as quiet and keeping to themselves--the little man who wasn't there. They preceive themselves as outsiders. They normally belong to no religious organizations, clubs, or interest groups. They either have little or no relations with women or the relationships they have have broken down. The basic problem appears to be that they are trapped in a bubble with themselves.
The question is what we can do to address this problem. It has shown up a number of times in history; the late Roman Empire and Renaissance Italy comes to mind. We might not care for the cure from those periods, the colapse of the Empire and the beginning of the Thirty-Years War.