Law enforcement confonts evil people

I still find myself in a state of disbelief days after it happened. As I continued reading the news headlines, I found myself struggling to understand the motives behind what happened.

It began after a 20-year-old man deliberately started a brush fire near Coeur d’Alene. As the first responders arrived on scene, they simply asked him to move his vehicle.

That’s when this man opened fire on these firefighters, killing two of them and critically injuring another.

It simply didn’t make any sense. I don’t understand why someone would attack those who willingly put their lives at risk to save the lives of others.

Granted, there were a couple of things I read that didn’t make a lot of sense, but it could’ve been the catalyst for what happened. For example, this man was living inside his car versus an actual home or apartment.

In addition, records showed he had run-ins with law enforcement in the past, but they were minor in nature. I also learned the shooter planned to become a firefighter at some point in his life, which left me wondering why he acted the way he did.

Unfortunately, this incident isn’t something we rarely see in today’s society. I point to the mass shootings this nation has dealt with over the past 20 years, including the one that happened during the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas on Oct. 2, 2017, in which 60 people died and more than 850 were injured.

That shooting and others like them normally involved a common thread — it took one person with a loaded firearm to claim the lives of dozens of innocent bystanders.

Unfortunately, this has become the accepted “norm” in today’s society. We have too many individuals out there that for many reasons seem to believe they need to destroy the lives of others because of circumstances in their own lives that convinced these individuals that this was somehow an acceptable course of action.

Looking back over the decades, I was saddened and sickened as I read about these and other mass shootings in U.S. history. There was one back in 1927 that at one time was the worst mass murder in this country.

It was known as the Bath School disaster and included three separate bombings that happened in Bath Township, Mich., on May 18, 1927. Those bombings killed 38 elementary school children along with two teachers and four other adults while injuring 58 others.

Most of the victims were seven to 14 years old.

The bomber, as strange as it may seem, was the school board’s treasurer, Andrew Kehoe. He was enraged about a property tax levied to fund the construction of the school building. He blamed the additional taxes on leading to the foreclosure of his farm.

Those events apparently provoked Kehoe to plan his attacks. Over several months, he secretly planted hundreds of pounds of explosives inside the school while working there as a janitor.

On the morning of May 18, he beat his wife to death before setting his farm buildings on fire. As firefighters arrived at the farm, an explosion devastated the north wing of the school building, instantly killing many schoolchildren.

As rescuers started gathering at the school, Kehoe drove up to the school, stopped and detonated a bomb inside his shrapnel-filled vehicle, killing himself and the school superintendent in addition to killing and injuring several others.

During rescue efforts, searchers discovered an additional 500 pounds of unexploded dynamite and pyrotol planted throughout the basement of the school’s south wing. Kehoe apparently had intended to blow up and destroy the whole school.

Incidents like these recorded over the past century illustrate why police departments, sheriffs’ offices and law enforcement agencies across the United States stepped up efforts to deal with these senseless tragedies. They know that it’s only a matter of minutes – sometimes seconds – that determine the outcome of these crimes, all of which are committed by individuals wanting to create as many casualties as possible.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s not the weapons that are to blame. It’s the sick, twisted, demented minds of these individuals who no longer recognize the difference between good and evil or comprehend the difference between right and wrong. Whether they ever felt remorse or regret for their actions will never be known, although my gut tells me that the answer was always “no.”

It’s these reasons that require law enforcement teams across the United States to significantly revamp the way they train their officers, deputies or troopers. Unfortunately, what our law enforcement and medical teams need to practice these days has somehow become the new “norm” both in the United States and other nations around the world.

It’s not a matter of “if” another mass shooting will happen but a matter of “when” and how bad it’ll get. I just hope society will eventually find ways to improve itself and provide needed help to those stricken with the mental illnesses that try to lead them to commit these horrible acts and to stop these people before they lash out at society.

– Brian S. Orban