More on the Chapel Hill shooter, and anger

Last updated on: February 24, 2015 at 9:16 pm by Jane the Actuary

More on the Chapel Hill shooter, and anger 2015-02-24T21:16:19-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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(For context, see my post from Wednesday.)

I just wrote the text below as a comment elsewhere and wanted to add this here as a means of holding onto the thought to think about some more:

This is a difficult topic.

This case doesn’t fit into our neat categories.

Hate crime? Not in the same way as the man who shot people at the Sikh temple, then killed himself.

Though I haven’t seen much on the timeline, the news articles report that he “turned himself in.” Maybe that’s police-speak for “we had him surrounded,” but it doesn’t sound like it. Were there witnesses that pinned this on him, or some incontrovertible evidence, and they had his own condo surrounded?

I suppose this is what’s called a “crime of passion” ultimately. He was reportedly always angry, and now he’s not only killed three innocent people, but has thrown away his own life — and for what? (In the inner city, when you read about people shooting over arguments over high-end sneakers, the shooter is often not known — a drive-by shooting — or at least believes he’ll get away with it.)

Perhaps their being “foreign” to him exacerbated his anger, but in any case we have a man who, in the abstract, believed in tolerance, according to his wife, but at the same time, went through life angry — and the parking spot issue seemed to be an obsession with people not parking in visitor spots when they weren’t actually visitors but lived in the complex, even though it didn’t seem to affect him personally. How can a person be so angry that they kill over it, and that, even when they destroy themselves in the process? And yet how often does it happen, and just doesn’t make the national news because there’s no “racial” angle about it? That is, ultimately, what troubles me about this report.

*************

But here again we have on display the destructiveness of anger — even so-called “righteous anger.” It’s not quite at the level of mental illness — I doubt this guy will succeed in a “mentally ill” claim unless he was hearing voices or the like. The “anti-theist” bit was one way that this killer had an outlet for his anger, a seemingly-harmless one of posting things online. His obsession with residents parking in visitor spots (which seems not to be motivated by he himself having visitors who couldn’t park there) was another outlet. Had he been black, that anger might have had an outlet in complaints about racism. Is that low-level anger that so many people carry with them, or the elevated level of others, connected, did it cause this? Or is this wholly unrelated?

And is it possible for an “always angry” person to will themselves to be, well, less angry?

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