When Murder Seems Justified
The first time I sat down to watch the show “Dexter” was in 2014 after I had filed for divorce. I did a lot of painting as therapy back then, and when I paint, I usually want some sort of background noise. For whatever reason, I decided that while I was dealing with the fallout of divorcing a narcissistic sociopath who, at that moment in time, was sitting in Leavenworth Prison, I should watch a series about a serial-killer vigilante who used his psychopathic impulses to murder people the imperfect legal system let slip through the cracks. Michael C. Hall played that character quite perfectly—to the point that you, the audience member, actually learned to care about and like the handsome psychopath and found yourself actually rooting for him to get away with it. You even maybe thought what he was doing…wasn’t really wrong.
I found myself sitting back and going, “Oh. This is exactly how I got drawn into my husband’s fantasy world where what he was doing was somehow justified and okay. But at the end of the day…the dude is still a damn sociopath!”
I’ve sat back the past week or so and watched the debates swirling around the shooting of the CEO of United Health Care, Brian Thompson. There’s a large group of very vocal advocates for this kind of “Batman-esque” vigilantism. Many of them I consider friends.
And don’t get me wrong: I understand the righteous anger behind this. And if you’re a pro-death penalty kind of person who believes taking the life of someone who has taken other lives is justice…well, then it’s easy to see where you would find the justice in this kind of action. But many of the people I see saying this kind of killing is okay are actually not pro-death penalty.
Admittedly, I’m also not a pro-death penalty person. There are a lot of reasons for that I won’t go into here as this isn’t a post debating the merits of capital punishment. That doesn’t mean I shed a lot of tears when evil people get what’s coming to them. I didn’t exactly cry when Jeffrey Dahmer was killed in prison. Nor did I shed a tear when they executed John Joubert (a serial killer of young boys that was a big story when I was growing up in Nebraska).
While a CEO of an insurance company that denies upwards of one-third of all its claims certainly has blood on his hands as life-saving care, medications and procedures have undoubtedly been denied to millions of people who needed it all for the sake of profit, I don’t suddenly cast aside my anti-death penalty stance.
However, if I’m one-hundred-percent honest, that’s not even the real reason I’m not jumping on “the shooter is a hero” bandwagon for taking out an arguably despicable person. My reasons for not lauding this sort of vigilantism are far more personal.
It takes a certain personality type to go to the trouble of printing a 3D untraceable gun, etch out a message on the shell casings, travel across state lines to lie in wait for your target and then shoot them in the back.
It takes a sociopath.
Sure, that sociopath is really good looking, has a nice smile, six-pack abs and is a health nut—and he even likely has some ideas and stances that he’s posted on social media that would resonate with a lot of us. And, we don’t like the guy he killed.
But at the end of the day, he’s likely a sociopath.
Now here’s the problem with sociopaths: to get to the point where you are able to casually kill someone the way he did, didn’t happen overnight. I can almost guarantee there will be some history of abusive behavior in his past, even if it’s been buried by his wealth and privilege.
I’m not going to go into my entire story (I literally wrote a book that tells that story, if you want to read about that, you certainly can here) but the short version is I was married to a handsome, charming man with a narcissistic personality disorder (that truly bordered on being sociopathic as well) who went to prison for making death threats against a employees of both a mortgage company and HUD who he claimed were destroying his life.
Now I think we all can agree, mortgage companies (and even the federal government) have destroyed a lot of people’s lives as well. Maybe not as directly as a health insurance company, but they also have predatory practices that can lead to dire circumstances for people. They, too, profit off other people’s misfortunes sometimes, or take advantage of their circumstances with things like subprime lending, etc. Anger at such companies is understandable. After all, those mortgage companies are what threw us into the 2008 financial crash that affected the entire country. Those millionaire/billionaire CEO’s maybe were fined, but almost none of them wound up in prison where they belonged for destroying all the lives they did.
Yes. That injustice is real. And its devastating.
So when my husband was arrested and ultimately accepted a plea deal for “intimidating a federal employee” over what seemed an unjust foreclosure on his home, I felt sympathy for his cause. (At least, sympathy for how he framed it, not the reality of what the situation was, but that’s another story.) Now, that “intimidation” was actually in the form of a death threat (which I didn’t discover until later) but honestly, even if I’d known that at the time, I might not have had the truly visceral reaction I did later on.
Because we understand that everyone has their breaking point. Threatening to take out and destroy the people who have made your life a living hell—well, that seems understandable. Some people really do deserve to be treated terribly for their part in an unjust industry/system, right? Especially when they’re getting rich off your suffering.
It’s easy to go there. Obviously. I did. I bought into it. Why was my husband being punished just for losing his temper? Something any of us might do.
Except, most of us don’t actually do what either he or the UHC shooter did.
The problem is, once you start excusing that kind of behavior, believing that these CEO’s, etc. deserve what’s coming to them (even if you wouldn’t necessarily be inclined to actually take that action yourself), it’s funny how quickly you start to believe other people deserve to be treated horribly as well. How you justify it in your head, or are manipulated into justifying it.
Because the reality of my husband was, this kind of behavior was not directed solely at a mortgage company or the government employees at HUD. It was directed pretty much at anyone who crossed my husband in any way. What I was unaware of when I was staunchly defending my husband’s behavior was that there was this whole other life going on. A life that involved berating and screaming and yelling at any one who did something he didn’t like His abusive rants were not relegated to CEO’s. They were directed at the cable guy, the local banker, customer service people, Walmart employees, a home insurance adjuster (again, we might sympathize with that one), a counselor, a receptionist…a daughter. A brother. A mother. A wife.
When I finally filed for divorce, I discovered a whole rabbit hole of other stuff that had been going on for at least the past twenty years. Police reports of battered ex-girlfriends. Restraining orders. Court documents that included theft and other malfeasance. I won’t go into the details. The point is, there was a pattern of abusive behavior. And like narcissists do, he had managed to always frame himself as the victim in each and every case.
And it’s really easy to frame yourself as a victim when the industry or system you’re going after has created a lot of actual victims.
I’m not saying our shooter wasn’t himself a victim. He may have even in this case legitimately been one as I know there’s some history of back pain in his case. (My ex was not an actual victim as it turned out.)
Still, many of us are victims of this kind of injustice and we don’t print out an untraceable 3D gun, etch messages on the shell casings, travel across state lines, wait around for our target to appear and then shoot them back. Why?
Because we’re not freaking sociopaths, that’s why! (And we understand there are consequences to such actions. That rules and laws really do apply to us, too.)
I can almost guarantee there’s another side/story to this shooter. You don’t plan like that unless you have other abusive, violent tendencies. You just don’t. And given the privileged life he’s led thus far, guessing he truly feels that certain rules and laws shouldn’t apply to him.
No, I don’t care how cute he is. My ex was handsome, and was meticulous about his appearance and hygiene. He spent a lot of time comparing his physique with his brother’s who was a physical fitness professional.
I don’t care how seemingly “spotless” his background is. (My ex’s exploits didn’t catch the attention of the authorities until he was well into his thirties, so no a twenty-six year old likely doesn’t have much of a record.)
Am I simply projecting my experience onto this? Possibly. But I also think maybe it requires a little projecting of my experience. I know what it’s like to get sucked into thinking that such behavior and actions are somehow justified. My therapist said I’d been “brainwashed” into normalizing that behavior.
She was right, and I fear societally, we’re all being brainwashed into normalizing this kind of thing. If it’s done against despicable people we have our own grievances against, maybe then it’s okay. Maybe then it’s justifiable. Maybe they’re a hero, not a villain. Because one villain can’t be responsible for taking out another villain, right? Someone HAS to be the hero here, right?
Wrong. This is a story with a lot of victims, a lot of villains, and absolutely no heroes. It’s tragic in so many ways. Because we want there to be a hero. We almost desperately NEED for there to be a hero.
We want this ONE wrong to actually make a right given the millions of wrongs the CEO was responsible for.
We want the Dexter’s of the world to not pay for what they’ve done because we live in that slippery slope of what true morality looks like. We live in a society that says gun rights are more important than the lives of children. Where the media and law enforcement spends more time on the death of a rich CEO with countless deaths on his hands than on the stabbing of two immigrants who were killed outside their apartment simply for not speaking English.
We live in a society where a seventeen-year-old can cross state lines illegally and shoot three unarmed people and claim he “feared for his life” because they were not exactly stand-up citizens themselves, and then go on a book tour profiting from the crime he got away with. It’s disgusting that person is being lauded as a hero by some as well, and we are all fed up with it.
We live in a society where greedy corporations get to decide whether or not you receive the medical care you need and profit off human suffering.
We live in a society where some believe that health care is a privilege…not a basic human right.
I absolutely get it. I get the anger. I share it. I desperately want to fix our very corrupt, very broken healthcare system (and government for that matter). I want to tear down the systems of inequality that are baked into this country. I want to tear down the rich and powerful and raise up the humble and poor.
But turning another likely sociopath into a hero maybe isn’t the winning strategy some think it is. Because once you start justifying one kind of violence/murder, it gets easier and easier to justify others.
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