On the Occasion of a Sikh Massacre

There are few religions in the world that I admire more than the Sikh faith. These are my brothers, at least in one of their most sacred concepts.
[A]ll baptised Sikhs (Khalsa) must wear a kirpan [sword or dagger] at all times....

The kirpan is both a defensive weapon and a symbol. Physically it is an instrument of "ahimsa" or non-violence. The principle of ahimsa is to actively prevent violence, not to simply stand by idly whilst violence is being done. To that end, the kirpan is a tool to be used to prevent violence from being done to a defenseless person when all other means to do so have failed.
It is a shame that none of them were able to bring the kirpan to its proper use today. Perhaps we shall learn that some of the fallen were trying. In any case, they are a fine and noble people, and I am terribly sorry for their loss.

8 comments:

Dad29 said...

We in the Milwaukee area feel a lot worse than you do.

Lone 'balding, overweight, white male in his 30's' is the latest report; lived in Cudahy (another Milwaukee south-side suburb.)

Texan99 said...

If there's anything sadder than some jerk opening fire on a group of people who remind him of some obscure ethnic or political grudge, it's the same guy not even hitting the group his fever-swamp brain thought he was aiming at. But I hear the killer didn't survive the attack, and that's always best.

Texan99 said...

That comment didn't come out right. I don't mean that it's sadder than he hit one ethnic group rather than another, but just that the sheer level of stupid, pointless mistake seems magnified when even his delusions are complicated by further delusions. Some skinhead jerk who can't think of any of life's problems except in terms of skin color against skin color.

We've been watching the Ken Burns series "War," and I'm in a particularly foul mood about segregation this morning after watching interviews with black and Japanese-heritage American citizens who tried to serve in WWII.

Grim said...

You know, a lot of the speculation has run that way. It looks like the guy was former PSYOP, for which there is an assessment and selection process.

Given that he was active duty at Bragg, he may even have been in the 4th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne). (It is now known as the 4th Military Information Support Group (Airborne)). That's a special operations unit, although what it was like in the mid-1990s I couldn't tell you.

In any case, the odds that he was an idiot who couldn't tell one ethnic group from another are small. The odds are that he was trying to craft a message.

Texan99 said...

I know I said it's horrible to contemplate this kind of thing having been a compound delusion, but it's just possible that it's more horrible if he was attacking a particular ethnic group from a cold-blooded and nominally rational desire to make a political statement.

Either way, I'm glad he's dead now.

Grim said...

We are all glad of that. It's best when they die, and spare us the cost of a trial that can have no satisfactory outcome under the laws we have. The death penalty twenty years from now, when he would have been sixty years old and living at our expense for two decades, is simply inadequate.

I do regret the damage to the psychological operations' reputation. They are an outstanding group of people, by and large. The capacities they provide are highly sought-after by deployed units. I've always enjoyed working with them; we had two TPDs and their several TPTs in Iraq that I worked or traveled with at different times.

Nevertheless, the odds of this having been a message are the higher for his having been trained to think about crafting kinetic actions for psychological effects. Notice, too, that he went on to form a message band that tried to 'combat apathy' and motivate people to action -- apparently racist action, since the band used Hammerskins imagery, and one of the band members was a Confederate Hammerskin from North Carolina.

What remains to be seen is whether he was really acting alone. There's a nonzero chance that this story isn't really over yet.

bthun said...

"Texan99 said...
<snip>
Either way, I'm glad he's dead now.

1:20 PM
Blogger Grim said...

We are all glad of that. It's best when they die, and spare us the cost of a trial that can have no satisfactory outcome under the laws we have. The death penalty twenty years from now, when he would have been sixty years old and living at our expense for two decades, is simply inadequate.
"


Nods in agreement

"I do regret the damage to the psychological operations' reputation. They are an outstanding group of people, by and large."

Undoubtedly there will be voices who will try to tie this murderer with the Army/Psy-ops...

From what I'm hearing, this character was a misfit whose instability earned an other than honorable discharge.

Some people, luckily an infinitesimal percentage of the human race, are predisposed to such random and senseless acts. Rarely does reason or analysis offer a satisfactory explanation for the motivations or acts of these individuals.

They are a special subset of the average half-bubble off plumb character.

Nicholas Darkwater said...

Perhaps a new revelation is in order. A modern equivalent of a kirpan can now be a SiG Sauer P226.