Animals do not kill as rampant we now do

Nov 26, 2017 Features / Columnists, My Column

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I was a young man when the news broke that Charles Manson and a group of mainly women entered a California home and killed a number of people. I distinctly remember a pregnant Sharon Tate and a family headed by a man named Leno LaBianca. The year was 1968 and the hippie revolution was well and truly on. Those murders gained international coverage and the name Charles Manson was never forgotten by me. The victims never met Manson and his group of girls, but that meant nothing. Manson and the girls killed people they never knew, stabbing some of the victims more than two dozen times.
Manson died last week at the age of 83, never to walk the streets again. He kept seeking to be paroled as recent as 2012, but was denied in each case. There is a famous movie of the trial. It is named Helter Skelter after the Beatles song that prompted Manson to do some of the things he did.
Decades later there were equally gruesome killings. There was the mass shooting at The Quebec City mosque that occurred on the evening of January 29, 2017, at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City, a mosque in the Sainte-Foy neighbourhood of Quebec City, Canada. Six worshippers were killed and nineteen others injured when a lone gunman opened fire just before 8:00 pm, shortly after the end of evening prayers.
The recent shooting at First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, which killed 26 people, pushed the total of victims lost in mass killings this year to 208. There was the Columbine school shooting in 1999 that killed many children, the mall shooting during which a lone gunman just killed even more people, and the Sandy Hook school killings in 2012 in which nearly two dozen children were killed along with six teachers. This past week a story jumped out at me from the foreign news package that is posted every day. Some gunmen entered a mosque and killed 235 people. This was so shocking that I wondered whether the world is continuing on its road to madness. People are just killing others for no known reason.
In this latest mosque shooting, the victims may have been members of another branch of Islam, but they were simply praying. I grew up believing that one of the safest places to be was a place of worship. Police did not enter a house of worship to make an arrest.
A lot has changed. People are robbed in churches as was the case in St Philip’s and St Sidwell’s. People are robbed on their way to church to pray for themselves and for the sinners of the world. Now they are killed like lambs to the slaughter.
I grew up believing that life is sacred and people should not kill. In fact, there are associations that rail against governments for seeking to enact the death penalty. There is a United Nations Conventions against the death penalty. Lawyers have moved to the courts to halt executions.
Even in times of war there are conventions that determine when a soldier is allowed to kill. There are limits to the guns he can use, although these days guns are so powerful that a bullet could miss a man and still rip his arm off if it passes close enough.
Soldiers kill outside the ambit of the war, as was the case in the M Lai Massacre. This was the Vietnam War mass killing of between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians in South Vietnam on March 16, 1968. Indeed this was just before the Manson murders. How could a person simply kill someone he never met before?
Even in Guyana we have had people kill others unknown to them for no known reason. Some kill in the execution of robberies, but the United Nations rules determine that the killers should not be killed. President David Granger is on record as saying that he intends to execute no one. He believes in the sanctity of life.
One widely held view is that parents are to be blamed. They are expected to bring up their children in the straight and narrow, with the fear of God. They are expected to instill in their children the Eighth Commandment.
However, another school of thought is that the environment is often stronger than the admonitions of parents, so we have gang killings and the senseless mass killings.
Is there so much anger in the society that people kill at the drop of a hat? Men kill their wives simply because of a misunderstanding; siblings kill each other after a quarrel.
I always say that a person has only one life and he should live it to the fullest. He should do good, reach out to the less fortunate and protect each other.
Recently, a woman came to me in tears to report that the police were hounding her teenage son. She swore that her son was just a boy going about his daily life doing whatever odd job he could land. On this occasion he was in the Sparendaam lockups “for no known reason.”
I intervened and the police eventually released him because they had no hard evidence to keep holding him. A few months passed then the woman came back to me with the same complaint. I believed her. She told me that her son was in custody and that he escaped. It turned out that the police linked him to a series of robberies. They caught him in a car recently and this innocent boy had a large handgun in his possession. It had no bullets, but it was a gun. He was 17. He pleaded guilty to armed robberies and I now wonder where the mother was and how could she not know that her son was a criminal. A neighbour’s son was killed, shot in a water tank in South Ruimveldt. After his death people talked how this young man got a job and when he got his first pay he said that he was going to buy a gun. He did, then went on a robbery. He was prepared to kill. The police got him first.
Something must be horribly wrong with the society. I refuse to think about Jamaica where there have been more than 1,000 murders so far for this year.
By August there were 1,005 or an average of more than four murders a day.
Trinidad has had more than 400 murders for the year and I believe that most of them were drug-related. Killing is out of hand worldwide and we in Guyana, while far behind the global madness, are doing our best to keep abreast.
Is there a solution? Is the world coming to an end?

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