I was driving in the car yesterday with my wife Suzi and we were talking about the recent shooting in Parkland Florida where 17 students lost their lives and many, many were injured and emotionally scarred from the rampage of a mentally ill former student. Suzi asked me, “Doesn’t it seem like there’s more and more of these school shootings recently? It’s like an epidemic. I remember back in the 80’s when there was a rash of serial killings. These things seem to go in groups.” I responded to her, “I think it’s a matter of educating evil.”
What did I mean?
As uncomfortable as it is to hear from a pastor, I am a fan of listening to podcasts and reading books on ‘True Crime’. These are real stories retold by authors about crimes, both solved and unsolved. They lay out the story as it unfolded letting the listener/reader try to put the pieces together and solve the crime in their minds. I’m not quite sure why I enjoy this, but it seems to have something to do with my craving for justice. I have a significant part of me that is a defender, a vigilante at heart. I want to know that the bad guys are caught and the good guys get any semblance of closure and justice they can.
Regardless of the wisdom (lack of) of me filling my minds with crime scenes, forensics and heinous stories, I have learned a lot. I have learned about our criminal justice system. I have learned more about why bad people do bad things. I have learned about possible solutions and sharpened my eye to watch for danger around my family. Yet, as with everything I learn, I take it to a new level. My mind never takes a break. I think about things no one is talking about and making connections that many may not. The concept of educating evil cannot be new, but I haven’t run into anyone talking about it.
What does it mean?
Simply put, educating evil means that with every crime that is publicized another bad guy learned something to do differently. Bad guys (I’m avoiding the nuances of what makes a bad guy a bad guy for brevity) don’t think like good guys. When we heard of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold orchestrating a mass shooting at a school in Colorado, killing 12 students and injuring 21 others, we saw deranged losers who took out their frustrations on others and like cowards used extreme firepower to overwhelm people they hated and some they didn’t even know. But to the bad guys they learned how to shoot up a school. Numerous bad guys have read the reports and poured over the story and dreamed of a day when they could do this and get back at all those kids that disrespected them.
Recently I was listening to a True Crime podcast about one serial killer who would travel to places where another more famous serial killer was already killing so that his murders would be confused with the latter. Another serial killer dreamed of copying Jeffrey Dahmer’s cannibalism. Another copies Ted Bundy’s methods in murdering countless people. None of these men knew how they were going to carry out the evil in their hearts until they heard about someone else doing it. It is likely they were still going to harm someone by some method, but in reading about other killers whom they respected and looked up to, they learned a few new things about taking advantage of others and taking lives.
I am all for ‘Free Speech’ as a concept. Where I think that it crosses the line is when it significantly hurts people. Your free speech shouldn’t be able to significantly harm my life or the lives of those I love. When you can go on the internet and find recipes of how to flay a person and cook them, or build a pipe bomb from materials at Home Depot, or how to set up at the right trajectory with an arsenal of firearms in Las Vegas to shoot down upon a concert killing 58 and injuring 851, something is wrong.
Yes, I think that information should be available for the right reasons and yes, bad people will always find a way to get what they want to get. Yes, they will continue to idolize those who carried out what their corrupt hearts want to do. Yes, they will find a way, but do we need to make it easier for them? I actually am not in favor of everyone knowing everything. I don’t think that media should be allowed everywhere and publish everything any time they want. I don’t think wartime media should help the enemy know our locations and plans. I think there are some things that the majority of society doesn’t need to know. I believe firmly in accountability but I don’t believe it’s healthy to educate evil.
Many will be studying gun legislation during this time of the Parkland School murders, and they should. I am not against civilians owning weapons, although I think that citizens having paramilitary rifles is absurd, but I do think that more needs to be done to keep weapons of ‘mass destruction’ out of the hands of the bad guys. Yet, unfortunately I have been exposed to too many stories of serial killers (mass killers) who never used a gun, to think that’s going to solve very much. Evil will find a way.
To conclude my point: bad guys train bad guys. The more of their material we put out there, the more we make them famous, the more we sensationalize and give them attention, the more they will copy. Do I have a perfect answer? I do not. I’m just following the patterns of copycat killing that seems to be abundantly clear in the annals of U.S. History. If you put the right material into the hands of the angry, deranged, frustrated, hurting and mentally ill who want to lash out, you are educating the evil that is within them.
This dysfunctional, selfish and cowardly young man Nikolas Cruz, who took the lives of precious students learned how to buy and use a semi-automatic weapon, morph it into an automatic one, and get into a school and cause horrific destruction. He learned that. He didn’t know that when he was born. He was educated. The evil in him was educated by evil before him.
Oh, Lord, help us to eradicate it rather than educate it.
