by Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
Executive Editor Joseph Tartaro
There is a great line in the 1995 mystery crime thriller movie “The Usual Suspects” which comes to mind when addressing the question of good and evil. It is one of my favorite movies, directed by Bryan Singer and written by Christopher McQuarrie. The film, shot on a $6 million budget, began as a title taken from a column in Spy magazine called “The Usual Suspects,” after one of Claude Rains’ most memorable lines in the earlier classic film “Casablanca.” McQuarrie won an Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay) and Spacey won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance. It is often remembered for having one of the most definitive and popular plot twists in cinematic history, according to Wikipedia.com.
The line that came to my mind, as well as I can remember it, is: “The greatest trick the devil pulled was to convince people he didn’t exist.”
Among the people that don’t believe the devil, or evil, exist among us seem to be the most devout anti-gunners, who anthropomorphize inanimate tools, such as firearms (and knives), as evil rather than the people who use those tools to commit criminal acts.
As an extension of their anti-gun catechism, they believe that they can reduce crime and eradicate evil by eliminating the tools employed.
But that doesn’t seem to work. A recent Rochester, NY, shooting spree proved that even Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Draconian SAFE Act has failed almost two years after its enactment.
The devil apparently does seem to exist, at least in the minds of some evil-doers. Here’s just one example:
An alleged murderer, Todd West, in a shooting spree that left three people dead in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley and four more bodies in New Jersey told investigators the devil told him to do it and further advised him not to be so “picky” with his victims, a detective testified at a preliminary hearing in Allentown, according to LehighValleyLive.com, an online news site.
“The voice was telling him, ‘Just eat, eat, stop being so picky,’ ” Allentown police Detective John Brixius III testified.
When West was asked if police had the getaway car used in his crime wave, West told them he knew police had the car, “because he told him, referring to the devil,” Brixius said.
The detective’s account is one of an estimated 15 witnesses who were expected at the preliminary hearing.
West, 23, of Elizabeth, NJ, is charged with seven killings in all and authorities have agreed to try him in the Pennsylvania cases first.
Among the faces of evil in our present world are terrorists, who will use any tools available to commit the most heinous crimes, including ancient tools like swords, clubs and rocks to modern ones such as guns, airplanes and improvised explosive devices.
They even export their evil to other countries than their own, sometimes in the name of religion, the primary venue for discussions of good and evil. And they have perpetrated their evil not just in the Sept. 11, 2001 bestiality in the United States, but in Spain, Great Britain, France, Germany, Norway, Israel and almost everywhere else in the world, if one follows the news reports.
These terrorists are probably the best proof that the devil—and evil—really do exist in modern societies, no matter who denies their existence.
The latest example appears to come from Sweden, a country that pretty much bans private gun ownership and is believed to be relatively crime free. The attacker who recently stabbed two people to death at a school and wounded two others in Sweden before being shot and killed by police had a racist motive, police said, according to The Associated Press. Whatever the motive, it has to be rated as the work of the devil.
Police labeled the stabbing in the industrial town of Trollhattan a hate crime based on discoveries they made when searching the man’s home, the way he dressed, his behavior at the scene and the way he selected his victims.
“All together, this gives a picture that the perpetrator had a racist motive when he committed the crimes at Kronan school,” police said in a statement.
The 21-year-old masked man, who has not been identified by police, entered the school in southern Sweden on Oct. 22 and stabbed four people, two of whom died, before he was shot by police. He later died of his wounds.
For those who wish to commit evil, the tools can certainly vary, especially in countries like Sweden where guns are not common.
Last year, a group of knife-wielding men attacked a train station in southwestern China, killing at least 29 people and injuring more than 130 others in what Chinese officials then called a terrorist strike, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
Four of the attackers were shot dead and only one was captured alive after the mayhem, which broke out about 9 p.m. at the Kunming Railway Station in the capital of southwest China’s Yunnan Province.
But this was far from an isolated incident. Evil committed with knives instead of guns is still evil, and China has had a lot of it in recent years. From about 2010 to 2012, mass murders with knives as tools plagued schools in China, just as the US experiences evil perpetrated with firearms.
On one morning in China in December 2012, a 36-year-old villager identified as Min Yongjun stabbed 24 people, including 23 children and an elderly woman, in a knife attack at Chenpeng Village Primary School. The children targeted by the killer were reported to be between six and eleven years of age.
The mass murder of those Chinese children as they arrived for classes bears a striking similarity to the mayhem the same month and year in Newtown, CT, at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
That incident had followed other school attacks in China since 2010 by mentally disturbed men involved in personal disputes or unhappy with the rapid changes occurring in Chinese society.
In response, the Chinese government took steps and began posting security guards at schools across China, thus insuring that good guys with guns would be able to stop at least some of the bad guys with knives. Apparently they listened to NRA-EVP Wayne LaPierre’s words a week after the Sandy Hook tragedy. And so did the Swedish government. Few in the US have done so.
There is a difference between good and evil which the anti-gunners in the US don’t seem to comprehend.
