America's tendency to kill

Apparently, the best remedy for a nation in economic despair is a healthy dosage of murder.

Being the violence-driven society that we are, what else would solve our financial woes as we look bleakly at our bank statements and wonder how we are going to afford next month’s car payment. The solution, of course, is unleashing an armload of automatics onto an unsuspecting community – suddenly defaulting on your mortgage is the least of your worries.

Take for example one of the most recent mass murders to make headlines, the killing spree of Jiverly Wong in Binghamton, N.Y. The newly divorced, gun-loving maniac opened fire in the American Civil Association (where he had essentially flunked out of English class) and killed 14 people before taking his own life.

But this tragedy is only a small segment of the killings taking place from sea to shining sea. A week ago a gunman took out his aggression at a nursing home in North Carolina, killing seven residents before he was shot and arrested by police.

A major trend sweeping the nation seems to be the slaughtering of an entire family by the head of the household. Take for instance the Lupoe family of Los Angeles in which the father killed his five children and wife. He then contacted the local Fox affiliate via fax with a suicide note blaming the situation on his upcoming termination at a medical center, and promptly killed himself. 

Another family slaying took place recently in Graham, Wash., where a man killed his five children in a mobile home park before committing suicide. In Santa Clara, Calif., a father who was employed as an engineer with Yahoo! killed his two children, brother-in-law, sister-in-law and niece before shooting himself.

If that was not enough, an Ohio man living on the outskirts of Columbus took the lives of his son, daughter and wife before committing suicide. He left a note, but its contents are not being released to the public out of respect to the family.

“Most of these mass killings are precipitated by some catastrophic loss, and when the economy goes south, there are simply more of these losses,” Criminologist Jack Levin of Northeastern University told the Christian Science Monitor. 

While the majority of these murders do not provide a compelling link between the current economic crisis and the decision to kill, there are implicit correlations. At the very least, these attacks have come in such quick succession of one another that it is impossible to disregard the financial meltdown as at least an ancillary cause.

It is a terrible situation when financial problems lead someone to kill those they were trying to support in the first place.