It was a bloody night in Kirkwood Missouri tonight. I live about twelve miles from Kirkwood, Missouri, which is normally a peaceful community. At tonight’s meeting at the Kirkwood City Hall, however, things would be different. And armed man, apparently a lunatic, barged into the Kirkwood City Council meeting and shot seven people attending the meeting, killing five of them. [1] the scene was depicted in detail by a newspaper reporter who happened to be at the meeting [2]:
“He came from the back of the room,” said Janet McNichols, the correspondent. “He kept something about, ‘Shoot the mayor’ and he just walked around shooting anybody he could.”
McNichols said the shooter first fired at Tom Ballman, a police officer at the meeting. She said she looked up to see the officer shot in the head.
Thornton then targeted Public Works Director Kenneth Yost, who was sitting in front of McNichols. He was also hit in the head, she said.
“After that, I was on my stomach under the chairs,” she said. “I laid on my stomach waiting to get shot. Oh God, it was a horror.”
McNichols said Thornton continued to yell about the mayor, and from his voice and the gunshots, she could tell he had approached the dais at the front of the room where the council sits behind a semicircular desk.
At some point he fired at City Attorney John Hessel, who told McNichols he fended the attacker off by throwing chairs.
When many people hear of these sorts of incidents, they think about how horrible it is and how this sort of thing should never happen. I agree with those sentiments, but I inevitably have another thought that I find more disturbing. When I hear of these sorts of incidents I am almost always surprised that they don’t happen more often than they do. Why would I say that?
Because we live in a society of almost 300 million people, many of whom are living on the edge, financially and psychologically. We live among too many people who have become socially isolated. We live among millions of people who are suffering mental illness who are not getting treatment. We live among numerous people who feel victimized for numerous reasons, and who look to government as one of the main culprits.
If you doubt that there are so many people on the edge, I suggest that you walk the sidewalks and streets of your city more often and look into the faces of the people you will pass. Yes, most of them will be normal people, friendly people. But one out of a hundred people have that look that they have been pushed to the edge of desperation. Many of them violently take out their frustrations on their own spouses and children, in private. But once in a while, one of them will take a loaded weapon into a place where peaceful people are meeting to seek what appears to them to be revenge. After all, anyone pushed to a higher level of desperation can justify that anyone they decide to shoot deserved to be shot.
Combine this huge population of desperate people with the easy availability of weapons, plus the ubiquitous images of violence on television, and the situation become all the more volatile, it would seem.
In no way am I justifying the actions of the madman who killed those five innocent people tonight. On the other hand, I am truly amazed that more people don’t act in similar fashion more often. I am at a loss to explain why it doesn’t happen more often. Many people assume that the status quo is some sort of floor, as though things can only get better. If that’s optimism, it’s naive optimism. The status quo isn’t any sort of floor unless we work hard to make it a floor. I’m not convinced that we’re working hard enough to nurture and rejuvenate the all-too-many desperate souls currently walking the streets.
I thank my lucky stars that events like tonight don’t happen 100 times or 1000 times every night, from coast to coast.
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