On a cold January Thursday morning in 2010, Timothy
Hendron was in his car preparing to enter his work at the ABB Power Factory of ST.
Louis. What was different this morning was that Hendron was armed this time
with an AK-47 style assault rifle, two hand guns, a pump action shotgun, and hundreds
of rounds of assorted ammunition in which to re-load them with.
Timothy Hendren then proceeded to ruthlessly cut down and
kill two innocent fellow co-workers in the complex parking lot, and then killed
another person and injured two others when he entered the industrial building shooting
indiscriminately throughout the facility. His mass shooting
spree continued unhindered until an employee with a concealed handgun
started firing back at Hendron as he approached potential victims who were hiding
down the hallway in a break room.
Timothy Hendron then went on to take the easy way out as
many mass shooting spree perpetrators do; he blew his own brains out before the
cops could get to him.
It would be fairly obvious to conclude that Timothy Hendren
was not very happy with his employer or fellow employees, that fails to explain
his extreme actions though. Hendren’s neighbors seemed surprised when told the
news of his psychotic rampage and the outcome of his deeds. The only real clue to
what sent this man over the edge was that he was active in a labor lawsuit involving
the ABB Company’s pension plan. Now a pension plan would obviously stir
emotions in most of the people it pertains to, but going on a killing spree
over it is certainly like cutting your nose off despite your face, especially
if you don’t intend to be around to enjoy retirement anyway – What are these
people thinking when they turn into homicidal maniacs over daily life issues? –
Are these newly indoctrinated killers a different breed than your run of the
mill serial killer, or hopefully you and me?
What makes seemingly “normal” people do such unreasonably
abnormal violent things? That question has been in debate for as long as the
problem has existed without a clear cut scientifically proven theory as of yet,
outside of the basic age old faults of human nature itself.
Envy of ones co-workers would seem to be an obvious factor
in wanting to shoot them, along with of course a basic sense of daily aggravation
with the people they work with, but still these common irritants rarely end up in
a mass shooting spree. There has to be something about these “types” of people
that set them apart from the rest of us who don’t kill several people when things
start to not go our way.
Mass
shooting perpetrators are said to have similarities to their serial killer
cousins such as hurting animals in their youth, or some form of past abuse in their
childhood. This may tie them together according to an on-line article in the
Huffington Post Science section that was posted soon after the Sandy
Hook Elementary School shooting. Although their killer traits may be
similar to that of a sociopathic psychotic killer, they have a major difference,
a serial killer kills from obsessive compulsion or mental defect, or just plain
because they are evil rotten human beings, but these “mass shooters” held down
jobs and lived with family members. These
people weren’t there just for a cover story to elude detection from law enforcement
and the rest of society; these people dealt with these future mass murderers on
a daily basis, and they still had no clue or prior warnings about their neighbor,
family member, or co-workers evil intent welling up inside them.
Something made these people snap and suddenly
have no regard for any life what-so-ever, including and especially their own; call it an ultimate inferiority
complex that serial killers rarely share with mass shooters.
This type of
mass shooting epidemic was nothing new to the year 2010, society had already
endured a long string of violent, senseless shooting sprees. From Virginia Tech
in 2007 when Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 innocent souls on campus, and then of
course killed himself last instead of first like normally depressed people
would have, to the shocking shooting betrayal in 2009 at Fort Hood when Army
Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 of his fellow soldiers and wounded 30
before being brought down by a police officer. Obviously with Major Malik the strains
of the gulf war and the rhetoric of Al-Qaeda had something to do with this shooting
spree; but then again the military found him “sane” enough to counsel their troops
as an active duty officer and trained psychologist – ooops to say the least,
obviously this had more to do with Major Nidal Maliks general mental state at
the time of the incident, rather than
the mental stresses of dealing with the war on terror, along with the strain of simultaneously being
an American Muslim officer in the U.S. Army.
Over and over again, be it school,
workplace, or movie theatre, the
main theme in these maniacs picking places to enact their twisted revenge on
the rest of us, is designed to hit us
exactly where we usually feel the most safe, at school, at work, and of course a military fort
or movie theatre. These violent nuts have one thing in mind and in common during
their mass shooting sprees – teach society a terrible lesson they won’t soon
forget for kicking them around mentally or financially for so many decades, and then of course after their terrible deed immediately
opt out of life’s contract. This suicidal tendency of snubbing their nose at
society one last time by giving us the same guarantees they were given when arriving
on earth, seems to serve as their final explanation of their heinous actions –
No One Said Life Was Fair! This mortal trait seems to be another defining difference
between the mass killing spree shooter and the average serial killer – I’ve
never heard of a serial killer wanting to commit suicide on purpose, even when surrounded
or caught red handed by the police. A serial killer’s ego usually would never even
consider taking such a societal commoner’s mentally un-superior way out such as
self-murder.
The modern accepted definition of
a “spree killer”
is someone who has committed two or more murders without a cooling off period.
This is what separates them from your ordinary serial killer. Not having a
proper cooling off period seems to be another of the most prevalent traits that
all “shooting spree killers” have in common. If someone in their lives saw the
warning signs a head of time, possibly
these terrible incidents would be growing fewer instead of more frequently, if the perpetrators simply had a cooling off
period to get their heads together and realize that shooting co-workers, or perfect strangers simply because your angry
has no basis in rational “normal” societal thought and should be deemed as what
it is – absolute insanity with still no definite reliable diagnosis, prognosis,
nor cure to imply this national epidemic of indiscriminate shooting sprees will
end anytime soon.
With Newtown’s
26 dead being freshly remembered, let us remember all the other shooting incidents
that fell before it, and also remember that without some sort of drastic action,
regardless of the latest politics on gun control, we will still have no more
control over stopping mass shooting tragedies in the future, than we do today.
