KILLERS

Well, it's official, we're the biggest killers of any species on this planet. Human beings and house cats are the only creatures on Earth who kill for no reason at all, and the suspicion is that house cats learned it from us. Lions don't do that stupid shit, they know it's a waste of precious food to kill a zebra and then not eat it. Then again, lions don't have the ready access to automatic weapons like so many humans have. In places where people are eating straw and clay to try to survive one more day, everybody and his crazed brother seems to own an AK-47.

So today in Germany and in Alabama you have reports of morons going on a rampage and killing people in double figures just because they can. Not much of a reason, but since when did deranged killers have a logical explanation for their actions? And if they did have a complex reason, why would anybody care? It sure makes no difference to the dead people, who remain dead forever while the rest of us try to figure out the motivations of a maniac. That never seems to prevent these things from happening again.

What shocks us about these two killing sprees is that they were undertaken in peaceful towns. What happened in these two places was probably repeated a dozen times since then in some war-torn place or another on this globe and nobody really noticed. Plenty of civilians get killed in our wars and it's no comfort to them that they were killed in a war instead of by some deranged loner. Their deaths many be lamented as "collateral damage" or some sort of military error, but what the hell do they care? Dead is dead and there's no witty reply to be heard from the the victims.

So we satisfy ourselves with wringing our hands over these two psychopaths in Germany and Alabama, shocked at their behavior. Shocked because they weren't wearing a military uniform, maybe? Would that have been okay if Alabama and Germany were war zones? Wouldn't be the first time for either place. Maybe okay for the rest of us, but not for those whose lives were snuffed out. The behavior of these psychos is not all that far removed from the many wars we killers fight. We tell ourselves there's good reasons for our wars, God is on our side and the enemy is only worth slaughtering since they are subhuman dogs.

You can't have one mindset without opening the door to the other. If killing is just fine in certain situations, then the feeble minded among us will always take that theory one step further and start shooting up our schools and peaceful little towns just because they feel like it. That behavior is not as isolated as we'd like to believe. Humans are killers, and until we stop killing in sanctioned warfare we can expect more Columbines, Stuttgarts and Alabama killing sprees. This is what we as a people have created, a mindset that killing has its proper place. It does not. And keep the automatic weapons out of the hands of house cats and troubled loners.