Imagine that one day you take your family for a meal at a McDonald’s restaurant. As you are sitting and enjoying your meal a man walks in shoots and kills you and your family. You have no connection with this man and you have no idea who he is nor why he killed you and your family, but he did do just that.
Or how about one fine day you take a stroll through the campus of a major university. For absolutely no apparent reason a shot rings out and a bullet strikes you in your torso and you drop to the ground and bleed out. Again you have no idea who killed you or why but surely you are dead.
Imagine you are a young woman seeking a lifetime of helping others as a professional nurse. So you enroll in a nursing school and in order to attend your nursing school you share housing with a few other students at a location near your school. Then one night some guy no one knows bursts into your home, ties you and your friends up and one by one stabs each of you to death.
Each of these scenarios has actually happened across America in various locations and at various times. Utterly incomprehensible death and mayhem caused by a mass murderer. That these horrific events have happened is undeniable but they do. So the question is why do these mass murders happen? Is there anything anyone can do to prevent them from happening? What are the odds that you too can become a victim of a mass murderer?
The short answer as to why mass murders happen is simply because some people suffer from a degree and type of mental illness that compels them to kill.
One other aspect of this phenomenon is the public reaction to such events. The most recent event discussed in this book is the 2015 shootings in San Bernardino, California. Falling, as it did, on the heels of huge terrorist attack in Paris, France and with the perpetrators being as they clearly were both of middle eastern decent and Muslim the wide ranging outrage focused heavily on those two elements, especially the Muslim religion. Also happening as it did just as America’s presidential election campaigns were getting into full swing the rhetoric grew even more intense. So knowing well that the intensity of the rhetoric does not equal but actually distorts the author explores how the San Bernardino massacre compares with other mass murders in modern American history. You will find the results fascinating.
The book is titled ‘Mass Murders in America’ and is available right now at Lulu.com.
