The New York Times carried an interesting front-page article today. It was about a new California law that requires high school students to be instructed about affirmative consent -- that is, to practice saying "yes means yes" in interpersonal sexual matters from kissing to touching to intercourse.
The legislator who wrote the bill, which the governor signed, explained that it was intended to "change the culture" of these relationships.
In fact, the effort sounds more like trying to change biology.
Consider the facts. Men are generally interested in sex, lots of sex. Women also are interested in sex, but they generally prefer to limit their sexual relationships (at least those involving men) to ones with people they trust.
This difference may not be universal, but it has a history stretching back thousands of years. Intercourse between men and women can lead to pregnancy. In the days before reliable birth control, it often DID lead to pregnancy. Since women are the ones who have babies, it made sense for them to have intercourse only with men they trusted, i.e., guys who wouldn't abandon them upon learning that a child was on the way.
Birth control changed the dynamic somewhat, but not entirely. Even after pregnancy could be prevented, women who had many sexual partners often were called unkind names. Men who had many sexual partners often were admired for their virility.
This is what we are still working out. In recent years we all have read more stories than we want to read about young women who insist that they did not say "yes" to sex while their male partners are adamant that the women did not say "no."
Obviously, nobody should be coerced into unwanted sexual activity, but now we are wandering further into hitherto uncharted territory.
What California's legislature and teaching corps are trying to do is impose new manners -- a sexual etiquette, if you will. They are encouraging young women (and presumably young men since everybody is equal) to say yes each step of the way.
I imagine the procedure going like this:
--"May I hold your hand?"
--"Yes."
--"Would you like to hug?"
--"Yes."
--"How about a kiss?"
--"Yes, but no tongue."
I will stop here, but you can imagine the many follow-on steps in the affirmative consent conversation.
In short, affirmative consent casts sexual activity as a negotiated transaction.
Unfortunately, this transactional approach seems to require humans to "change the culture" in another way.
That is, by the elimination of "seduction" and, with it, a lot of what we used to call "romance."
Friday, October 16, 2015
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Box Cutters
I have been thinking about box cutters lately.
We all remember the heroic rescue of French train passengers last August. Three young American tourists stopped a would-be killer whose arsenal included a Kalashnikov assault rifle, a Luger pistol and a box cutter.
In America, also in August, came these reports:
-- A man was jailed in Connecticut for attacking his girlfriend with a machete and a
box cutter. When a second man intervened and took away the machete, the
boyfriend turned and attacked the Good Samaritan with the box cutter.
-- Missouri police arrested a man who attacked two people in separate incidents
with a box cutter. "I'm going to kill you. I'm going to slash your throat," he
threatened in one case.
-- Louisiana police arrested a woman for slashing another woman's face and
hand with a box cutter. Previously, the slashing victim had seen the slasher
walking with the victim's boyfriend.
-- North Carolina police arrested a man who slashed another man on the arm with
a box cutter after an argument, apparently over a game of cards.
-- In Harlem, two couples got into an argument in a restaurant over an umbrella.
Both men had come to the situation armed. One, carrying a box cutter, was
relieved of his weapon and stabbed to death by the other man, who had a large
knife; the dead man's girlfriend was stabbed and hospitalized.
These things occur with steady frequency. About 10 days ago in Pennsylvania, a woman who had been fighting with her boyfriend grabbed a box cutter and went after him with great intensity. He got pretty cut up, lost a lot of blood and suffered a cut near his eye that required emergency surgery. She has been charged with attempted homicide.
Box Cutters
I remember reading years ago that the weapons brandished by the 9/11 airplane hijackers were box cutters. I assumed that those box cutters were big, menacing implements that could hack apart the strapping on industrial pallets or casings of industrial products -- things like that.
My ignorance: Only yesterday did I look on the internet for pictures of box cutters. Below is the scariest looking one I saw. If that box cutter had a sharp enough blade and was dragged with force across a person's throat, I'm sure it could kill.
I also learned that that I have a box cutter of my own in my desk drawer. I use it VERY occasionally and never in anger, usually when attempting yet another failed craft project. (A paring knife suffices nicely to open boxes from Amazon.)
Anyway, I now know that if faced with a home invasion, I can pull out my own defensive box cutter. But I am not going to carry the thing, even retracted, in my handbag on trips to the bank or the grocery store.
Weapons
I am making no comment here about guns or hunting knives or crossbows or any of that.
It just strikes me that there are many dangerous everyday home implements and that people with bad intent are clever enough to put them to bad -- and often stupid -- uses.
Monday, October 12, 2015
The Takeout Slide
New Yorkers, particularly Mets fans, are steamed.
On Friday, in the second game of their National League Division series against the Dodgers, Dodger Chase Utley made a dramatic slide on his way to second base. His aim was to stop Mets shortstop Ruben Tejada from making a double play that would have prevented another Dodger, then running from third base, from scoring a game-tying home run.
The slide knocked Tejada into the air, and his right leg was broken when he fell. Utley was called safe on second, the Dodgers runner scored, and the team scored four more runs to win the game.
Here is an interesting discussion of the Ruben-Utley collision with replays from various angles.
As you can see, Utley had a strategic reason to go after Tejada. His slide had nothing to do with reaching second base -- which he missed by a good distance -- but everything to do with preventing a Mets double play.
This is called a "takeout slide." Utley performed the same maneuver against Tejada in 2010, but without breaking bones. Giants catcher Buster Posey suffered a broken leg and other injuries in a takeout slide the next year. (See below.)
There have been many other cases, of course.
This slide variation looks more like a football tackle's takedown of a wide receiver than anything in traditional baseball. But it can be very effective, and so has become more common in recent seasons. Sports radio fans will be discussing its legitimacy for days; Mets fans for years.
After the game, Joe Torre, the former Yankees manager and current EVP of major league baseball operations, overruled the umpires' field ruling and called Utley's play illegal. Theoretically, that could have cancelled the tying run and the four runs that followed. But theory is one thing, and real life is another. Utley was suspended for two games, which means he won't play today or tomorrow when the series moves to New York.
Now Mets fans are doubly angry. They will be deprived of the opportunity to boo, yell and throw bottles and cans at Utley, (treatment given to Pete Rose following an unfortunate 1973 encounter) because he will not be playing for the two games at Citi Field.
Ruben Tejada, of course, is out for the season.
On Friday, in the second game of their National League Division series against the Dodgers, Dodger Chase Utley made a dramatic slide on his way to second base. His aim was to stop Mets shortstop Ruben Tejada from making a double play that would have prevented another Dodger, then running from third base, from scoring a game-tying home run.
The slide knocked Tejada into the air, and his right leg was broken when he fell. Utley was called safe on second, the Dodgers runner scored, and the team scored four more runs to win the game.
Here is an interesting discussion of the Ruben-Utley collision with replays from various angles.
As you can see, Utley had a strategic reason to go after Tejada. His slide had nothing to do with reaching second base -- which he missed by a good distance -- but everything to do with preventing a Mets double play.
This is called a "takeout slide." Utley performed the same maneuver against Tejada in 2010, but without breaking bones. Giants catcher Buster Posey suffered a broken leg and other injuries in a takeout slide the next year. (See below.)
There have been many other cases, of course.
This slide variation looks more like a football tackle's takedown of a wide receiver than anything in traditional baseball. But it can be very effective, and so has become more common in recent seasons. Sports radio fans will be discussing its legitimacy for days; Mets fans for years.
After the game, Joe Torre, the former Yankees manager and current EVP of major league baseball operations, overruled the umpires' field ruling and called Utley's play illegal. Theoretically, that could have cancelled the tying run and the four runs that followed. But theory is one thing, and real life is another. Utley was suspended for two games, which means he won't play today or tomorrow when the series moves to New York.
Now Mets fans are doubly angry. They will be deprived of the opportunity to boo, yell and throw bottles and cans at Utley, (treatment given to Pete Rose following an unfortunate 1973 encounter) because he will not be playing for the two games at Citi Field.
Ruben Tejada, of course, is out for the season.
Thursday, October 8, 2015
Grandma's Celebrity Gossip
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| Grandma |
It’s been years since I did a dead celebrity list, so this one I’m doing early before any more bodies pile up.
Judy Carne died. She was the little loksh on “Laugh-in,” who got a frosk in pisk every time she said, “Sock it to me.” That you call a career? She did.
To Burt Reynolds she was married for ten minutes, but, hoo boy, everybody and their brother knew he slapped her around whether she wanted it or not. Then he canoodled with Dinah Shore after she dumped her husband, the putz George Montgomery, who dressed like the paper towel lumberjack. (Brawny?)
Later Burt Reynolds cavorted with Sally Field and then married Loni Anderson. They still look good, those two. But him? Like The Crypt Keeper with acid reflux.
Jean Nideth died. 91 she was. Jean lived in Queens, not too far from Selma M. (Selma’s full name I’m not giving because she’s still alive and reads everything). Selma, she had a weight problem. Plain talk: she looked like she was smuggling kugel in her pants. But in four months, she went from muumuus back to pedal pushers when she lost 20 pounds.
Her secret? She and her nextdoorekeh went to Jean Nideth’s house for diet tips. Long story short, Jean Nideth invented Weight Watchers and sold the company later to Heinz for $71 million. That was before John Heinz died and left his fortune to the wife Teresa Heinz, who married John Kerry, who would have been president if he didn’t look like the golem on "The Addams Family."
Ten years after selling Weight Watchers, Jean Nideth was flat broke and said: “Eh, The Lord giveth, and the croupier taketh away. Let’s nosh, girls!”
Yogi Berra died at 90. A real mensch he was. Everybody liked the man. My grandson Todd’s favorite quotes: “The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase.” And when Yogi’s wife asked him where he wanted to be buried, he said, “I don’t know. Surprise me.”
Farewell, Yogi.
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Manspreading
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| Manspreading |
If you do not spend much time on public transit or you are not in step with third- or fourth-wave feminism (I can never keep up), you may not have encountered the word "manspreading."
It's a new thing.
It arose sometime last year when women began posting social media photos of guys taking two subway seats by spreading their legs.
The issue rocketed around the world -- from New York to Europe to Canada and everywhere in between, including of course Seattle.
By last December, it had its own blog, mentakingup2muchspaceonthetrain.tumblr.com., subtitled "A CLASSIC AMONG PUBLIC ASSERTIONS OF PRIVILEGE." (Privileged subway riders, I wondered? Who knew?)
Then the MTA, New York's subway authority, began posting placards like this:
By the spring, men had rallied back with social media complaints about womanspreading, adding illustrations like the one below.
(In fact, womanspreading -- if that is the word -- is practiced by both sexes on all commuter rides of 20 minutes or more. People are wary of seatmates who might have oversized briefcases, loud cellphone voices or body odors.)
In May, the twitterverse crackled with reports that the NYPD had arrested its first two manspreaders, but the facts didn't match the situation. Police rounded up a couple of guys on a late-night subway ride; they may have been manspreading on the empty train but, more to the point, they were wanted on outstanding warrants.
This summer, the term "manspreading" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. This means we will have it for all time.
A Puzzle
This phenomenon honestly took me by surprise. My point of view has always been this: If someone is blocking your space, tell him to move over. If this doesn't work, say it again louder. And again if necessary. Eventually, he or she will get out of your way.
But a number of feminists seemed to see it differently. I wondered if the projection of clothed male organs triggered unhappy thoughts. But that seemed ridiculous.
Then one comment got me to thinking. It came from a spokeswoman for the Istanbul Feminist Collective, who I would have expected to be concerned with bigger issues. Anyway, here's her point:
"Trying to have the majority space is completely to desire power."
Finally, I understood. This may not apply so much to schlubs on trains, but it does describe one world leader.
Vladimir Putin
I'm pretty sure the Russian president doesn't ride in buses or subways. He's a quick-to-anger fellow with a big army and a fortune of $200 billion; nobody would try to crowd his seat anyway.
But Putin is about nothing if not power. And if power is projected by a wide spread, then he embodies power every time he sits down for a conversation.
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| Vlad chatting with Barack |
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| Vlad glaring at Bibi |
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| Vlad with his frenemy Jinping |
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| Vlad ignoring Francoise's comments on Syria |
Monday, October 5, 2015
Serial Killers
(At last, the third in a series. Humor tomorrow.)
Again, I start with a story.
One night some years ago, when I was on the night desk at a Dallas newspaper, reports began to come in about a killing in Galveston. The dead woman, in her final year of medical school, had gone for an early morning run. Her body was found near a trail, stabbed five times.
She and her husband had separated not long before, and police were making a lot of noise about going out and finding the guy.
Because she was raised in Dallas, my job was to call her family home and learn more about her. The family's priest got on the line, and told me about her childhood, personality, interests and accomplishments. I told him how sorry I was for the family's loss.
The dead woman was just a few years older than me. We had had similar upbringings, and she was about to start her career, as I had done a couple years earlier. Later a photograph crossed the wires. She even looked a bit like me.
Two months later, her mother and father walked across the stage and received their daughter's posthumous medical diploma.
About the same time, I got a hand-written note from her mother thanking me for taking the time to write more about her daughter than the facts of her death.
(This thank-you note stuff does not happen often in journalism, but the one other time it happened to me was after I wrote about another young woman, an only child, who also was found dead, murdered, in an isolated area. I don't believe her killer ever was found. My story was about the effects over two years on her parents. Journalism is not for sissies.)
Anyway. It turned out the dead medical student's husband did not murder her. Coral Watts, a serial killer did.
Watts, who was clearly twisted in the head, said he had first killed when he was 15 years old. He never gave -- and experts never defined -- a reason for his murderous ways. Killing was just something he did.
By the time he was convicted, prosecutors estimated that he had stabbed, hanged, bludgeoned or drowned as many as 50 women. He was hard to catch because he moved a lot, chose victims at random and did not rape them and leave forensic evidence. Everywhere he showed up, though -- Texas, the Midwest, Michigan, Canada -- bodies were found. After his conviction on several murders, he bragged that his total body count might be as high as 100. When an oddity of Texas law voided his death sentence and opened the possibility of parole, he admitted that, if freed, he certainly would kill again.
The young doctor's mother had written to the killer in prison years earlier to say she forgave him, but when the parole talk started, she said, "that does not mean I want (him) released. . . . I want him there all his mortal life."
He never got his parole. Coral Watts died in prison, at 53, of prostate cancer. He lived 13 years longer than his oldest victim.
Serial Killers
When we read about today's mass killers -- nut-jobs who use guns to kill as many people as possible all at once -- we want to say that this must stop. And I'm all for that. But we also need to pay attention to serial killers, who slay their victims in ones and two.
The mass killings are new, but serial killers have been with us forever. Most of them don't use guns. Most are driven by cruel and savage impulses. Virtually all of them want to avoid capture and to kill again. They don't want to die in a blaze of deadly glory.
It must have been easier to get away with this sort of killing in the past. You could change locations and identities pretty readily in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th.
As police cooperation and forensic research have improved, more of these killers probably are caught. But even now, it often takes years. And the grief these killers cause is every bit as deep as that caused by CNN's shooters of the month.
Here are some serial killers of the last 50 years.
Santa Cruz
The city had a prolonged rash of killings, starting in the late 1960s with the murders of a doctor and his family.
Several years later, a local man, Herbert Mullin, was convicted of shooting and stabbing 10 people (he may have killed five more) because voices in his head told him that was the way to prevent a major California earthquake.
Another local, Emil Kemper had murdered his grandparents when he was 15. Then, when he was released from juvenile detention at 21, he murdered six young women -- many of them hitchhikers -- by shooting, stabbing and smothering. He abused their bodies and then cut them up, often sexually abusing heads and hid the body parts. Later he beat his mother to death, raped her head and tried to pulverize her vocal cords in her kitchen disposal. Then he invited a friend of his mother's over and strangled her.
He is still alive in a California prison.
Pederasts
John Wayne Gacy, who worked as a clown, lured at least 33 teenage boys and young men to his home between 1972 and 1978. He assaulted all of them, then stabbed the first one to death and asphyxiated or strangled the others. Police found the remains of 26 of them in his basement crawl space.
Gacy was executed by lethal injection in an Illinois prison in 1994,
In Wisconsin, Jeffrey Dahmer raped, murdered and dismembered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991. His techniques grew more offensive with time, and included necrophilia, cannibalism and preservation in his home of body parts.
Imprisoned, he was beaten to death in 1994 by another inmate.
Medical Workers
Donald Harvey, a medical orderly in Kentucky, killed an unknown number of hospitalized patients to "ease the pain." Experts say he began in 1970 and picked up his pace because he enjoyed it and thought himself an angel of death. After his arrest in 1987, officials estimate he had killed between 37 and 57 people by poisoning, inserting coat hangers in their IV lines and various other techniques.
Harvey, imprisoned in Ohio on 28 life sentences, says his kill total is more like 87.
Two women, Gwendolyn Caroline Graham and Catherine May Wood met when they worked as nurses' aides in a Michigan nursing home in 1987 and quickly became lovers, practicing sexual asphyxia to achieve greater orgasms. Then they -- mostly Graham -- moved forward to asphyxiating Alzheimer's patients, which excited them. In a three-month period, 40 residents died at the home; officials identified eight suspicious deaths, and arrested both women for five of them.
Graham is serving a life sentence, Wood 20 to 40 years.
Genene Jones, a pediatric nurse in Texas, is estimated to have killed at least 11 and possibly as many as 50 children between 1977 and 1982.
While at work, she injected babies and toddlers with chemicals that caused cardiac arrest and hemorrhaging. The belief was that she wanted to act as the heroic savior to the children; in fact, many died. When she was accused and fired from one clinic, she moved to a second one and continued the practice.
Jones was convicted in two of the cases in 1984 and is serving concurrent sentences of 60 and 99 years.
Other Bad Guys
Donald Henry Gaskins murdered 13 people between 1969 and 1975, often beating and torturing them along the way. While serving eight life sentences in prison, he committed a final contract killing of a death row inmate, for which he was executed in 1991.
Richard Speck, who tortured raped and killed eight nursing students in a Chicago rooming house in 1966, previously happened to be in Michigan and Indiana when seven other women were raped and murdered, beaten and murdered or disappeared entirely. He died in prison of a heart attack at age 49.
Ted Bundy claimed he was drawn by pornography to ideas of torture. He raped and killed at least 36 young women in Washington, Oregon, Utah and Colorado in the 1970s. He escaped custody twice and was caught in Florida after killing two sorority members and a 12-year-old girl whose body he had dumped in a pigsty. He was executed in 1989.
MIlton Johnson of Illinois was first convicted in 1970 of torturing and raping a woman. After he was released from prison in 1983, his hometown and other cities where he spent time endured a rash of 20 savage killings. In two 1986 trials he was convicted of five killings and received two death sentences; five other murder prosecutions were deferred. He lives now in an Illinois prison.
Gary Ridgway, known in Seattle as the Green River killer, pleaded guilty to strangling 48 women in 1980s and 1990s. Most of his victims were prostitutes and teenage runaways. Their bodies were dumped near the river, and he often returned for sex with their corpses. In 2011, a 49th body was found, and Ridgeway confessed again and was given another life sentence.
Since then, Ridgway has tried to draw attention to himself by suggesting he may have killed many more women than have been found. Authorities don't know whether to take him at his word or to treat what he says as the narcissistic baiting of another loser whose only real accomplishment in life was to snuff lives out.
Again, I start with a story.
One night some years ago, when I was on the night desk at a Dallas newspaper, reports began to come in about a killing in Galveston. The dead woman, in her final year of medical school, had gone for an early morning run. Her body was found near a trail, stabbed five times.
She and her husband had separated not long before, and police were making a lot of noise about going out and finding the guy.
Because she was raised in Dallas, my job was to call her family home and learn more about her. The family's priest got on the line, and told me about her childhood, personality, interests and accomplishments. I told him how sorry I was for the family's loss.
The dead woman was just a few years older than me. We had had similar upbringings, and she was about to start her career, as I had done a couple years earlier. Later a photograph crossed the wires. She even looked a bit like me.
Two months later, her mother and father walked across the stage and received their daughter's posthumous medical diploma.
About the same time, I got a hand-written note from her mother thanking me for taking the time to write more about her daughter than the facts of her death.
(This thank-you note stuff does not happen often in journalism, but the one other time it happened to me was after I wrote about another young woman, an only child, who also was found dead, murdered, in an isolated area. I don't believe her killer ever was found. My story was about the effects over two years on her parents. Journalism is not for sissies.)
Anyway. It turned out the dead medical student's husband did not murder her. Coral Watts, a serial killer did.
Watts, who was clearly twisted in the head, said he had first killed when he was 15 years old. He never gave -- and experts never defined -- a reason for his murderous ways. Killing was just something he did.
By the time he was convicted, prosecutors estimated that he had stabbed, hanged, bludgeoned or drowned as many as 50 women. He was hard to catch because he moved a lot, chose victims at random and did not rape them and leave forensic evidence. Everywhere he showed up, though -- Texas, the Midwest, Michigan, Canada -- bodies were found. After his conviction on several murders, he bragged that his total body count might be as high as 100. When an oddity of Texas law voided his death sentence and opened the possibility of parole, he admitted that, if freed, he certainly would kill again.
The young doctor's mother had written to the killer in prison years earlier to say she forgave him, but when the parole talk started, she said, "that does not mean I want (him) released. . . . I want him there all his mortal life."
He never got his parole. Coral Watts died in prison, at 53, of prostate cancer. He lived 13 years longer than his oldest victim.
Serial Killers
When we read about today's mass killers -- nut-jobs who use guns to kill as many people as possible all at once -- we want to say that this must stop. And I'm all for that. But we also need to pay attention to serial killers, who slay their victims in ones and two.
The mass killings are new, but serial killers have been with us forever. Most of them don't use guns. Most are driven by cruel and savage impulses. Virtually all of them want to avoid capture and to kill again. They don't want to die in a blaze of deadly glory.
It must have been easier to get away with this sort of killing in the past. You could change locations and identities pretty readily in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th.
As police cooperation and forensic research have improved, more of these killers probably are caught. But even now, it often takes years. And the grief these killers cause is every bit as deep as that caused by CNN's shooters of the month.
Here are some serial killers of the last 50 years.
Santa Cruz
The city had a prolonged rash of killings, starting in the late 1960s with the murders of a doctor and his family.
Several years later, a local man, Herbert Mullin, was convicted of shooting and stabbing 10 people (he may have killed five more) because voices in his head told him that was the way to prevent a major California earthquake.
Another local, Emil Kemper had murdered his grandparents when he was 15. Then, when he was released from juvenile detention at 21, he murdered six young women -- many of them hitchhikers -- by shooting, stabbing and smothering. He abused their bodies and then cut them up, often sexually abusing heads and hid the body parts. Later he beat his mother to death, raped her head and tried to pulverize her vocal cords in her kitchen disposal. Then he invited a friend of his mother's over and strangled her.
He is still alive in a California prison.
Pederasts
John Wayne Gacy, who worked as a clown, lured at least 33 teenage boys and young men to his home between 1972 and 1978. He assaulted all of them, then stabbed the first one to death and asphyxiated or strangled the others. Police found the remains of 26 of them in his basement crawl space.
Gacy was executed by lethal injection in an Illinois prison in 1994,
In Wisconsin, Jeffrey Dahmer raped, murdered and dismembered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991. His techniques grew more offensive with time, and included necrophilia, cannibalism and preservation in his home of body parts.
Imprisoned, he was beaten to death in 1994 by another inmate.
Medical Workers
Donald Harvey, a medical orderly in Kentucky, killed an unknown number of hospitalized patients to "ease the pain." Experts say he began in 1970 and picked up his pace because he enjoyed it and thought himself an angel of death. After his arrest in 1987, officials estimate he had killed between 37 and 57 people by poisoning, inserting coat hangers in their IV lines and various other techniques.
Harvey, imprisoned in Ohio on 28 life sentences, says his kill total is more like 87.
Two women, Gwendolyn Caroline Graham and Catherine May Wood met when they worked as nurses' aides in a Michigan nursing home in 1987 and quickly became lovers, practicing sexual asphyxia to achieve greater orgasms. Then they -- mostly Graham -- moved forward to asphyxiating Alzheimer's patients, which excited them. In a three-month period, 40 residents died at the home; officials identified eight suspicious deaths, and arrested both women for five of them.
Graham is serving a life sentence, Wood 20 to 40 years.
Genene Jones, a pediatric nurse in Texas, is estimated to have killed at least 11 and possibly as many as 50 children between 1977 and 1982.
While at work, she injected babies and toddlers with chemicals that caused cardiac arrest and hemorrhaging. The belief was that she wanted to act as the heroic savior to the children; in fact, many died. When she was accused and fired from one clinic, she moved to a second one and continued the practice.
Jones was convicted in two of the cases in 1984 and is serving concurrent sentences of 60 and 99 years.
Other Bad Guys
Donald Henry Gaskins murdered 13 people between 1969 and 1975, often beating and torturing them along the way. While serving eight life sentences in prison, he committed a final contract killing of a death row inmate, for which he was executed in 1991.
Richard Speck, who tortured raped and killed eight nursing students in a Chicago rooming house in 1966, previously happened to be in Michigan and Indiana when seven other women were raped and murdered, beaten and murdered or disappeared entirely. He died in prison of a heart attack at age 49.
Ted Bundy claimed he was drawn by pornography to ideas of torture. He raped and killed at least 36 young women in Washington, Oregon, Utah and Colorado in the 1970s. He escaped custody twice and was caught in Florida after killing two sorority members and a 12-year-old girl whose body he had dumped in a pigsty. He was executed in 1989.
MIlton Johnson of Illinois was first convicted in 1970 of torturing and raping a woman. After he was released from prison in 1983, his hometown and other cities where he spent time endured a rash of 20 savage killings. In two 1986 trials he was convicted of five killings and received two death sentences; five other murder prosecutions were deferred. He lives now in an Illinois prison.
Gary Ridgway, known in Seattle as the Green River killer, pleaded guilty to strangling 48 women in 1980s and 1990s. Most of his victims were prostitutes and teenage runaways. Their bodies were dumped near the river, and he often returned for sex with their corpses. In 2011, a 49th body was found, and Ridgeway confessed again and was given another life sentence.
Since then, Ridgway has tried to draw attention to himself by suggesting he may have killed many more women than have been found. Authorities don't know whether to take him at his word or to treat what he says as the narcissistic baiting of another loser whose only real accomplishment in life was to snuff lives out.
Saturday, October 3, 2015
Shooting to Kill
(Second of three occasioned by the shootings at Umpqua Community College.)
Let me begin with another story.
Some years back, I was mugged at gunpoint one day outside a Saks store in a major U.S. city. The mugger pointed his gun (looked like the one at right) and demanded my handbag. He said three times that he would shoot me, and so I threw him my purse and he ran away.
Ten days later, my banker called and told me that one of my checks had been used an hour after I was robbed. The mugger's bank released credit on the phony $1,300 check, and the mugger immediately spent the money.
So I got on the phone with the number of the complaint I had filed and talked with police detectives who figured out immediately who the mugger was. For months afterward, I called and wrote detailed letters to cops, the asst. DA and the judge on the case. I offered to fly at my own expense to testify against the mugger.
But no. The mugger took a plea for check kiting and was sentenced to a year of probation. The armed robbery was a mulligan.
This was the fifth felony committed against my law-abiding siblings and me. Two of those involved serious personal violence, but even with possibly helpful information offered up by neighbors, police never investigated either one.
Anger can marinate in a person's head, and it did so in mine. I replayed the mugging in my head. I remembered a woman lawyer I'd known in Texas who carried a 357 magnum in her handbag. I reasoned that if the police couldn't protect me and the prosecutor wouldn't prosecute, I would have felt better if I had been able to take care of myself.
I had never shot a gun, and so I decided to do some research. I went to a gun store. The owner took me to a target range, handed me a Sig Sauer pistol and showed me how it worked. Then I tried my hand at shooting.
An hour later, I realized that it was not going to work. I had learned how to shoot at targets, but the idea of holding a gun on the street terrified me. I realized that it would take years for me to develop the confidence to shoot even in an appropriate situation.
It turns out I am not the only one.
Warriors
We all know that there are many videogames that simulate war situations. They are popular mostly with young men. In many cases, players use gunlike controllers.
For a certain very small subset of these young men, the games become almost addicting. Think of socially awkward types, the intensely introverted, the mentally ill, the ones whose lives seem to be going nowhere. Some of these guys spend all their days and nights practicing how to kill people. Effectively, they absorb modern military training alone at their computer screens.
What they do not absorb is the difference between military training and their immersion in war games. Soldiers shoot because they have been ordered to fight. Crazy people shoot because they are crazy; they have no concept of the rules of engagement.
One 2011 serial killer, Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik, spent two years in a bedroom in his mother's apartment playing a multiplayer wargame. Then he carefully planned and executed a bombing and shooting rampage that left 80 people dead. His view of reality had become so distorted that he said afterward that he was surprised that the people he targeted ran away from him and his guns rather than trying to fight him.
War-like video games almost certainly have made it easier for unhappy young men to contemplate doing what most people will not do: kill people.
To failed men, the games offer a fantasy of dominance in a world where they have been unable to succeed. If their thinking is muddled enough, the next step is to buy guns and imagine using them. From there, some actually go out and pull the triggers.
My bet is that it was one of these guys who killed all those people in Oregon this week.
Let me begin with another story.
Ten days later, my banker called and told me that one of my checks had been used an hour after I was robbed. The mugger's bank released credit on the phony $1,300 check, and the mugger immediately spent the money.
So I got on the phone with the number of the complaint I had filed and talked with police detectives who figured out immediately who the mugger was. For months afterward, I called and wrote detailed letters to cops, the asst. DA and the judge on the case. I offered to fly at my own expense to testify against the mugger.
But no. The mugger took a plea for check kiting and was sentenced to a year of probation. The armed robbery was a mulligan.
This was the fifth felony committed against my law-abiding siblings and me. Two of those involved serious personal violence, but even with possibly helpful information offered up by neighbors, police never investigated either one.
Anger can marinate in a person's head, and it did so in mine. I replayed the mugging in my head. I remembered a woman lawyer I'd known in Texas who carried a 357 magnum in her handbag. I reasoned that if the police couldn't protect me and the prosecutor wouldn't prosecute, I would have felt better if I had been able to take care of myself.
I had never shot a gun, and so I decided to do some research. I went to a gun store. The owner took me to a target range, handed me a Sig Sauer pistol and showed me how it worked. Then I tried my hand at shooting.
An hour later, I realized that it was not going to work. I had learned how to shoot at targets, but the idea of holding a gun on the street terrified me. I realized that it would take years for me to develop the confidence to shoot even in an appropriate situation.
It turns out I am not the only one.
Warriors
During World War II, a brigadier general asked average soldiers how they behaved in battle. His conclusion: Of every 100 men along the line of fire during combat, an average of only 15 to 20 "would take any part with their weapons." Those who did shoot, he said, often aimed their guns high to avoid killing even enemies.
This finding was contested hotly, but further research -- historical and scientific -- seemed to bear out the truth of it.
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (ret.) has studied this and written several books. In an essay, he explained further.
"Those who would not fire did not run or hide—in many cases they were willing
to risk greater danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages.
They simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy. . . .
"Why did these men fail to fire? . . . (T)here was one major factor
missing from the common understanding of this process. . . the simple and demonstrable fact that there is, within most men and women, an intense
resistance to killing other people. A resistance so strong that, in many
circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it."
In the interest of greater effectiveness on the battlefield, the military changed its training.
Target practice, for example, was replaced with hourslong, staged trench battles in which soldiers learned to shoot reflexively and instantly at human forms that popped up randomly.
There also was psychological training. Grossman quotes another author who wrote this: “The language used in [marine training camp] Parris Island to describe the joys of killing people,” writes (Gwynne) Dyer, helps “desensitize [marines] to the suffering of an ‘enemy,’ and at the same time they are being indoctrinated in the most explicit fashion (as previous generations were not) with the notion that their purpose is not just to be brave or to fight well; it is to kill people.”
Over time, firing by soldiers increased -- to 55 percent during the Korean conflict and as high as 95 percent in Vietnam. In more recent battles in Somalia and Iraq, very small groups of American soldiers handily repelled and defeated much larger guerilla forces.
Imitation of War
Below is a youtube post by a former U.S. Marine who evaluates the realism of online wargames as he plays them and then puts the results online. This episode depicts "The Crucible," a culminating 54-hour chapter in the final stages of Marine training.
We all know that there are many videogames that simulate war situations. They are popular mostly with young men. In many cases, players use gunlike controllers.
For a certain very small subset of these young men, the games become almost addicting. Think of socially awkward types, the intensely introverted, the mentally ill, the ones whose lives seem to be going nowhere. Some of these guys spend all their days and nights practicing how to kill people. Effectively, they absorb modern military training alone at their computer screens.
What they do not absorb is the difference between military training and their immersion in war games. Soldiers shoot because they have been ordered to fight. Crazy people shoot because they are crazy; they have no concept of the rules of engagement.
War-like video games almost certainly have made it easier for unhappy young men to contemplate doing what most people will not do: kill people.
To failed men, the games offer a fantasy of dominance in a world where they have been unable to succeed. If their thinking is muddled enough, the next step is to buy guns and imagine using them. From there, some actually go out and pull the triggers.
My bet is that it was one of these guys who killed all those people in Oregon this week.
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