Suspect in Kan. Doctor's Death Warns of Violence - Associated Press

"WICHITA, Kan. – Abortion providers say that threats of more slayings from a man accused in the shooting death of a high-profile Kansas abortion doctor proves the existence of a "violent, terrorist movement" coalescing around the issue.

Scott Roeder called The Associated Press Sunday from the Sedgwick County jail, where he's being held on charges of first-degree murder and aggravated assault in the shooting death of Dr. George Tiller last week at the doctor's church in Wichita.

"I know there are many other similar events planned around the country as long as abortion remains legal," Roeder said. When asked by the AP if he was referring to another shooting, he refused to elaborate.

"He is a terrorist — there is no question about that. I don't believe he is an isolated terrorist," said Dr. LeRoy Carhart, a Nebraska abortion provider who also practiced at Tiller's Wichita clinic." My guess is that the only terrorism being perpetrated is inflicted by Carhart's conscience.

Terrorist? From what I have heard about the case so far, Roeder is probably no more a terrorist than the Pope. But, if he is not a part of a vast nationwide conspiracy to kill baby killers, what is he? Can you say NUTJOB? Roeder is a psychological anomaly among the ranks of the anti-abortion crowd. I read a statistic today, that claimed 3-4% of our population could be classified with some degree of psychopathology. For the sake of a number, let's say that the anti-abortionists have an active membership of 10,000 across the country. That would give them roughly 300-400 seriously mentally disturbed members... or, about the same number of mentally deranged members as we have serving in our Congress.

Maybe it's time to re-think "hate crimes" and include profession as one of the specially protected categories. We can reach that conclusion through the process of elimination: if somebody willfully takes the life of another human being - a person that they don't even know - and the taking of that life wasn't during the commission of robbery, or other felony or capital crime, then it must be a "hate crime" since all other motives have been eliminated. And the legislature will certainly include attorneys in that special protections group. After all, what profession is more despised than lawyers? And lawyers comprise 90% of our legislators.

Motive For Ill. Church Killing Suspect Elusive

It's their job, I'm sure we all realize that. After the commission of a crime, it's the function of law enforcement to look for an understandable explanation of why the crime occurred in the first place. However, the more heinous the crime, the less likely there is to be any explanation. In the case cited in my title for this post, and any other case where people kill other people that they don't even know, and who presented no perceived threat to them, there are only two possible motivations:

1. Mental illness, or

2. the doer is the personification of evil

Mental illness - as a concept - is understood by most lay persons. What is not totally understood is the root causes of many kinds of mental illness. Most mental distress isn't the result of some physical illness or bacterial infection. It stems from a series of perceived wrongs or inequities, and their accumulation and storage. Frequently that is the result of chemical imbalances in the brain. The inability to discard such perceptions, after objectively evaluating and processing them, eventually creates more psychological "weight" than the individual can bear, resulting in mental collapse.

"Objectivity" is skewed in the mentally ill, and therefore perceptions are distorted, which results in skewed objectivity, which distorts perceptions, ad infinitum. We could easily get hung up on the "chicken-egg" argument here, but it really makes no difference in the outcome. We must also understand that perception creates our "personal reality." When several people witness the same event, they each process it in their own fashion and may perceive it as totally different events. Some processing is intellectual, but all processing is colored by cultural, emotional, political and spiritual influences. Thus is our personal reality formed.

An example of this would be the so-called "Extreme Fighting" matches. To most people from civilized backgrounds these physical confrontations - for the sake of feeding egos - are seen as barbarism. Two people enter a cage and proceed to beat one another senseless (my assumption here is that they had some sense to begin with). These matches always result in the victor injuring, sometimes in maiming, and, on rare occasions, killing their opponent. There are those others who see the same event as entertainment, fun, a test of skills, heroic personal combat, etc..

The key words in the preceding two paragraphs are "perceived" and "accumulation and storage". Most people are capable of observing, processing, evaluating, and then compartmentalizing events. Some compartments are for the purpose of recall at a later time, while others are for discards - things that the person has witnessed that are either neutral influences, or negative influences. These are events that have little or no positive influence on their life, and are otherwise just burdensome.

There is disagreement within the medical and psychological communities over the possibility of somebody being evil by nature. Arguments against an "evil nature" would fall short of explaining the "motives" of people like Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin, Papa Doc Duvalier, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacey, Richard Speck, the 9-11 terrorists, et al.

The motives behind the actions of others are not always visible to others, simply because others do not share the actors' personal reality - it's as foreign to them as Egyptian hieroglyphics would be to the vast majority of the worlds' people. Searching for motives created by a deranged mind, beyond the elimination of what the "normal mind" might see as motive, is generally a waste of time, effort and resources.

The willful taking of a human life, one that is otherwise unknown to you and presents no apparent threat to your life, is either an act of severe mental illness ... or evil personified.

I could be wrong about this, I suppose ... but you'd have to be insane to think so!