The American Spectator

Copycat murders are nothing new either. In the late 19th century and early 20th centuries assassinations and anarchist bombings were virtually monthly events, one provoking another. President McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was copying — indeed obsessed with Gaetano Bresci — the man who assassinated Italian King Umberto I a year earlier, going so far as to copy Bresci’s type of handgun.

The day after the Bath massacre, the New York Times’s front page headline stated: “Maniac Blows Up School, Kills 42, Mostly Children; Had Protested Taxes.” The next day the Times’ headline was “Maniac-Dynamiter Had No Help.” The lead paragraph of one story read: “Still stunned by the deed of the madman Andrew Kehoe, who yesterday killed his wife and then blew up the consolidated school here and his own automobile causing the death of forty-three persons, including himself, this little community today was groping its way through tears trying to meet the awful consequences of the tragedy.”

Today the press would never consider calling Auvinen a maniac or a madman. Instead we try to understand his motivations, and when we do not like what we find, the rants about thinning the herd of undesirables, we blame lax gun laws, video games, YouTube, even other students who ostracized him, and we pretend there is something about modern society responsible for these tragic events. The truth is Auvinen was a maniac and a madman. We will all be better off when we stop pretending that they do not exist.