In April 2007, Cho Seung-Hui went on a rampage, murdering fellow Virginia Tech classmates. He left behind extensive documentation about his feelings, including a videotaped denunciation of Christianity. Not much was mentioned about that angle at the time -- and you'll find even fewer references to that today. So while we learned this immediately after the murders:
The package included an 1,800 word statement and 27 QuickTime videos showing Cho talking to the camera and discussing religion and his hatred of the wealthy...
A full week later (and to this day) we hear: "No motive found". (But wouldn't "hatred of the wealthy" and a certain religion count as motives -- and political ones at that? Apparently not.)
On December 9th, 2007, Matthew Murray opened fire at a Arvada, Colorado YWAM center (in my church at the time, incidentally) killing two and wounding two more, and then drove to New Life Church in Colorado Springs where he killed two more (though clearly he had intended to take many more) before being gunned down by a member. Murray had a deep hatred of Christianity, and was into Satanism and pornography. Some articles mentioned his motivations, but many others, like this ABC news article, and this Denver Post article published at the time, spun it more as "revenge" against YWAM specifically, omitting Murray's broader hatred:
Motive: Revenge
Authorities believe that Matthew J. Murray, 24, was motivated by revenge after he was spurned by the missionary organization that also has offices on the New Life Church campus...
Two months later, on February 15th, 2008, Steve Kazmierczak, a former Academic Criminal Justice Association Vice-President and "social justice" activist, walked onto the Northern Illinois University campus and murdered five people, and wounded eighteen more. Not long beforehand, he had apparently been fascinated by Hamas, and how the group could care about social justice, as he did, but also embrace violence to further those goals:
"Once we took a course called 'The Politics of the Middle East.' At the beginning of the course, our instructor informed us a research paper would be due by the end of the semester. Steve decided on Hamas, which is known mainly to the world as being a Palestinian terrorist group, which was the first thing that interested Steve about the group. But he also heard Hamas funded many social services, which also interested him. How could one group be put into two completely different categories, Steve would ask," she wrote.
"Unlike most of us, Steve started his research from day one, reading every book he could find on Hamas. He'd give me a status report when we saw each other in class. Steve said that his perception of Hamas changed with all the research he did," she said.
These motivational aspects of the story did even not make it into the mainstream accounts.
Yesterday, initial reports seemed to indicate that Jim David Adkisson, who just opened fire and killed two in a Unitarian Church, was also motivated by a dislike of Christians. The Knoxville local paper initially carried this report:
"He had his own sense of belief about religion, that's the impression I got of him," said neighbor Karen Massey. "We were talking one day when my daughter graduated from Bible college, and I told him I was a Christian, then he almost turned angry. "He seemed to get angry at that."
When I looked yesterday, there were very few articles covering that angle. Google the first line of that quote (and/or narrow it to just news articles) and you'll find it appeared almost nowhere.
Yet since yesterday, the narrative changed: Where early reports blamed a hatred of Christianity, evidence has now emerged that he was motivated by a hatred of liberalism. Now search Google news for his name -- "Adkisson" -- and his most recent set of motivations are stated in the headlines of almost every story -- especially in the most prominent sources:
"Shooting suspect hatred liberals" - USA Today
"Rampage attributed to hatred of liberalism" - WaPo
"Police: Man shot churchgoers over liberal views" - AP (listed three times)
"TN gunman targeted church over its stance of gay rights" - Times Online
"Hatred Said to Motivate Tenn. Shooter" - New York Times
"US church killer 'hatred liberals'" - BBC News
It would be hard to intentionally create a more ideal objective test for media bias than this, wouldn't it? One day, release a story saying a murderer was apparently motivated by hatred for a "right wing" group. See how much press the story gets. The next day, switch things around -- release the exact opposite story about the exact same guy: Now he's motivated by hatred for a "left wing" group. And again see how much press the story gets.
Half a dozen or so stories versus thousands, seemingly.
Is this a matter of "man bites dog" (where even the press is used to lefties shooting people by now, and it's truly unusual to see a conservative do it)? Is it a matter of selection bias? Is one set of motives more "interesting" than another -- at least to journalists? Or am I just getting this wrong somehow, and missing something obvious in each case above?
I would suspect it turns out that there's some truth to both aspects of the story.
Every time I hear Michael Savage (the guy was a fan) I think: "Who likes this guy?" A number of his views are anything but conservative. (I suspect he's simply a guy who hates gays and cloaks that within a political ideology. This guy sounds like he had similar motivations.)
Sad thing is, police can often choose to sit on such documents indefinitely (as in the VA Tech shootings) so we're often left just hearing whatever they deign fit for us to know.
It wouldn't surprise me if there were a small number of conservatives like this guy. He was unemployed, he had social problems (his former threats to kill his wife aren't usually making it into the news articles, though) and when our life shows us we're a failure, we're all tempted to find scapegoats.
Back in the 1950s, it was, by in large, the conservatives who were the conspiracy theorists. Certain members of the John Birch Society believed Jews were working with the Communists etc. Bill Buckley ejected that fringe (to his credit) and created modern conservatism.
Today, nut-jobs are mostly attracted to the left.* But of course that doesn't mean there can't also be a few on the right: the potential certainly exists, as history shows. Get enough people, and all kinds of combinations emerge.
(* I believe this is a product of culture and socialization. Two generations ago, even non-religious people were largely raised with largely Judeo-Christian "imprinting". So mental dysfunction operated over a set of Judeo-Christian assumptions. Today, the standard set of values is secular: so dysfunction emerges in more "leftist" flavors.
This guy, by some accounts, was raised in a rather strict Christian context. Even though he may have resented that, it may have structured enough of his view that his paranoia was still constrained within that context. So you get a right-wing wacko: he's rejected the core ethics (don't murder! take responsibility for yourself!), possibly also hates conservative religion, but still operates within some of the trappings, in a secularized context.)
Ah yes, transparency when it's convenient. :-)
I tend to think that it's more interesting than just "the left" where the nut-jobs seem to congregate now. There tend to be some kind of blending between the leftist and “rightist” nut jobs. Somehow, their discontent becomes a uniting force — along with their strange desire to talk about armed revolution. Just look at the followers of Ron Paul Marat — their only unifying attribute is discontent and paranoia. One will blame the blacks, another the Jews, (okay, well most of them will blame the Jews under the guise of 'neoconservatives'), some big corporations, some big government, etc. It's like some kind of alien political world, disconnected from history and reality, where people are just discontented in their core being — when, in fact, they live at the highest standard of living, ever, in a relatively peaceful country, enjoying freedoms that range into the absurd (assuming you're not sick or unborn). And yet they reject the one thing that can relieve their discontent.
Thank you for doing this research Tim. I almost started on it last night, but I was way too tired. I remembered in the morning seeing that he "Hated Christians", and by evening he "Hated Liberals," which I found to be a radical shift in motive, and causing me to question my sanity. I'm thinking that once the police report is made public, it would be interesting to look at what the interviews there say.
Posted by: Michael Zappe on July 29, 2008 11:03 AM