Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Atlanta Shooter

All through this morning, the TV titillation-news-channels had a ball with the capture of the guy named Brian Nichols from Atlanta, Georgia, who, when he was about to get convicted for rape charges, overpowered a deputy, took her gun, and killed her, the judge and another court worker. The same man, the next day, allegedly took another customs agent’s truck and killed him also. They caught him this morning when he took another woman hostage inside a condo complex to the north of Atlanta.

Some say this man is violent and crazy, or from a twisted or deprived background, or he’s just plain evil. The first two opinions could be, but the last one I can not agree with. I do not see how anybody can be extremely good, or extremely bad. I can’t ever buy into the argument of most religions on “evil.” Incidentally, that is why I don’t follow any one organized religion.

What I think is this: we are far behind in our civilization in understanding what makes people act the way they do. Some people may even have an unknown gene for it. It is already established that the xyy chromosome is responsible for the behavior of most sociopaths. Instead of labeling people as “evil,” we could try harder to find why they act so horribly and find a way to correct the underlying causes that foster their outrageous crimes.

It is such a pity that this man, who is only thirty-three years old, has wasted his entire life. Whatever his punishment will be, he has no place in society, probably not even in a jail cell.

Could we have prevented this from happening? Can we prevent the next Nichols? Probably not, but we could surely spend more time, effort, and money on the causes, so there won’t be more victims in the future.