Another Homegrown Terrorist, This Time in Tennessee

Posted by Cyn | Filed under News

Police: Man Shot Church­go­ers Over Lib­eral Views

Knoxville, Ten­nessee — An unem­ployed man accused of open­ing fire with a shot­gun and killing two peo­ple at a Uni­tar­ian church appar­ently tar­geted the con­gre­ga­tion out of hatred for its sup­port of lib­eral social poli­cies, police said Monday.

That makes a lot of sense. This whack­job is unhappy because he lost his job, gets a let­ter say­ing he’s los­ing his food stamps too, and instead of blam­ing the Repub­li­cans who have been in charge of the coun­try for the past eight years, he trots off to the near­est UUA con­gre­ga­tion and opens fire dur­ing a children’s performance.

Two peo­ple are dead, one because he gave his life in an attempt to save oth­ers. Five more are injured – no chil­dren, at least.

What did those peo­ple do to upset the home­grown terrorist?

The Unitarian-​​Universalist church pro­motes pro­gres­sive social work, includ­ing advo­cacy of women and gay rights. The Knoxville con­gre­ga­tion also has pro­vided sanc­tu­ary for polit­i­cal refugees, fed the home­less and founded a chap­ter of the Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union, accord­ing to its Web site.

Good­ness. How upset­ting. Obvi­ously, they caused him to lose his truck­ing job. Yep. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

Sam Har­ris’ views on reli­gion make more sense every day.

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Permalink | July 28th, 2008

5 Responses to “Another Homegrown Terrorist, This Time in Tennessee”

  1. Waya Says:
    July 28th, 2008 at 6:56 pm

    Our friend Jess used to co-​​run the Spec­trum queer youth min­istry at TVUUC. The gen­tle­man that got killed was a dili­gent vol­un­teer and pas­sion­ate about help­ing queer youth. There’s a lot of stunned incom­pre­hen­sion here.

  2. cyn Says:
    July 28th, 2008 at 10:35 pm

    I wasn’t coher­ent enough to put that together with where y’all are. If we can do any­thing to help, please let us know. *hugs*

  3. Dena Shunra Says:
    July 28th, 2008 at 10:52 pm

    I have found this case dis­turb­ing at a very fun­da­men­tal level, per­haps because it is the liv­ing exam­ple of the prob­lem with free speech.

    The issue of “the only answer to hate speech is more speech” seems to be wrong (despite the fact that I des­per­ately want to believe in it). Our soci­ety seems to have a bro­ken polit­i­cal dis­course (in addi­tion to the bro­ken health care sys­tem, the bro­ken fam­ily sys­tem, and the bro­ken finan­cial system).

    I don’t think that the killer was reli­gious, or shoot­ing because of reli­gious views. He *said* he was out to kill peo­ple for their polit­i­cal views, and tar­geted a church where peo­ple of the polit­i­cal view that has been dehu­man­ized by Fox et al. con­gre­gate. How­ever, I noted a cou­ple of other things about him: he was adopted as a new­born, grew up in a church­go­ing fam­ily (and appar­ently dis­ap­proved of being forced to go to church) and tar­geted the church to which his ex-​​wife belonged — the ex-​​wife whom he had threat­ened to mur­der (Google Liza Alexan­der for more about this; she was his fourth ex-​​wife, and I did not see any infor­ma­tion about any of the oth­ers). More­over, he did this just before his food stamps eli­gi­bil­ity was about to run out.

    So he had rage (unem­ploy­ment, lone­li­ness), fear (no food, com­ing right up, and ris­ing costs), and a strong soci­etal voice say­ing that the peo­ple he was mad at (his wife, and the com­mu­nity that embraced her when they were divorced) were trai­tors and should be killed. More­over, he had mil­i­tary train­ing (Air­borne?) which implies another strong voice that shouts “kill-​​kill-​​kill” inside his head. And early sep­a­ra­tion trauma.

    And what’s scari­est is that there are many peo­ple just as angry, just as des­per­ate, and hear­ing just the same messages.

  4. cyn Says:
    July 28th, 2008 at 11:15 pm

    You know a lot more about his back­ground than I’ve seen so far, but I’m Googling to catch up now.

    Yes, he had many prob­lems – but, as you say, so do many other peo­ple. I believe that the anti-​​intellectualism of this coun­try, the refusal to encour­age crit­i­cal think­ing, con­tributes to this kind of crime. Did it make any sense for him to lash out at peo­ple who had no direct con­nec­tion to his prob­lems? No. Did his ex-​​wife cause his prob­lems? I seri­ously doubt she had any­thing to do with them. But he lashed out, because they were an easy tar­get and, as you said, those who share lib­eral views are vil­i­fied regularly.

  5. Dena Shunra Says:
    July 28th, 2008 at 11:27 pm

    That’s exactly it — there are many other peo­ple in this coun­try who have been given tacit soci­etal per­mis­sion to lash out mur­der­ously at a dehu­man­ized, neb­u­lous entity vaguely referred to as “those lib­er­als” by a spe­cific stream of anti-​​democracy pun­dits (which are on the right wing side of pol­i­tics here and now; the left wing has had its share, of course).

    Con­sid­er­ing the fact that pres­sures are ris­ing and the U.S. has nearly zero by way of sup­port net for those who will fail, I am afraid of an epi­demic of repeats.

    And of course, his ex-​​wife didn’t cause his prob­lems. They divorced in 2000, more than eight years ago. (Yes, I’ve been googling this all day). The *cause* of his prob­lems is a bro­ken soci­ety, where peo­ple become des­per­ate and enraged and have no way to express these feel­ings that is soci­etally accepted except for the form known as “sui­cide by cop”.

    Other soci­eties have had other ter­ri­ble responses to these same sort pres­sures: killing minori­ties, going to war, clamp­ing down on var­i­ous per­ceived Oth­ers. Where in the world is there less of this sort of thing in times of cri­sis? Can we learn from any part of his­tory how NOT to become col­lec­tively hostages of mad­men in tough times?