Marshals & Victims

While acts of violence against employers by ex-employees is tragic, it is not new. For example, on April 17, 1881, a drunken Bill Johnson attempted to assassinate city marshal Dallas Stoudenmire with a shotgun in El Paso, TX. Johnson’s blast missed completely because he was stewed as an owl. Stoudenmire and his brother-in-law, Doc Cummings, returned fire hitting Johnson eight times. He died on the spot. Johnson was former marshal Stoudenmire’s deputy. He was sore about the rough treatment he got when Stoudenmire fired him and took away his keys to the jail. I think it’s natural to wonder what motivates an individual to act in this manner. You can’t help trying to noodle it through. There’s no excuse for it, but those that feel harshly persecuted act irrationally. The mind is a fragile thing and people behave badly. Some are just crazy and others are just evil. The kind of evil the main character in the movie the Bad Seed displayed. The kind of evil that pretends they’re the victim. I know plenty of really bad people who have gone to great extreme to show themselves as victims. Somewhere along the line society took the wrong fork in the blame road and decided to give these nut jobs (who are no different than Johnson) the attention they so desperately longed for in the first place. If I were U.S. Marshal Sam Sixkiller, the great lawman I’m writing about who died in 1886, you could put those so-called victims down and go across the street for a cup of Joe. Much as I wish it were at times life isn’t an Eastwood picture. Over the last seven years it’s more like Planet of the Apes and I’m Heston walking up in the field and seeing the chimp on top of the pony.