Monday, August 09, 2010

Some Voices of Sanity are Beginning to be Heard in the Omar Thornton Case

By Nicholas Stix

I’m not a fan of head shrinkers, but sometimes one of them says something sensible, in spite of his training. And sensible talk has been a public rarity since racist black thief Omar Thornton snuffed out eight people’s lives and wounded two others, for the crime of breathing while white.

Fox News posted a commentary on Thornton, “Racism Did Not Cause Omar Thornton to Kill in Connecticut,” by psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow, that the AP would never condone.

Family members of Omar Thornton, the man who murdered eight fellow employees in Manchester, Connecticut yesterday, then killed himself, are claiming he did so because he was being harassed for being black….

His uncle says that when he called his mother after the shootings he talked about having killed the “five racists” who were bothering him.

Well, nine people are dead, not five, and not a single one of them lost his life because somebody called Omar Thornton a vicious name or drew a hateful picture….

I’ve evaluated plenty of murderers during my career as a forensic psychiatrist, and I can tell you that people don’t commit atrocities because of name-calling.

They don’t perpetrate carnage because they are undone by crude, insensitive drawings.

They kill because of longstanding psychological or characterological disorders that lead them to have no ability to reason, or no impulse control or no capacity to appreciate the suffering of others or no moral compass.

Most often, the signs that a person is capable of murder are numerous and longstanding—though often tragically missed or, worse, swept under the rug.

Killers turn out to be people who have been struggling with psychotic thinking and have talked about it….

They are people who have shown a pattern of seeing themselves as beyond reproach, and whose exaggerated or bizarre reactions to perceived slights have revealed it.

Frankly, more ominous than his family’s reports of racial bias against Omar Thornton are questions that should be asked about whether he may have been suspicious of others to the point of paranoia, along with company reports that he was being fired for stealing beer….

Whether his family wants to acknowledge it or not, it has to be the case that unreasoned rage had been brewing in Omar Thornton a long, long time.”

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