The Mad Bomber of Bath

I went to Old Dog's link last night, and I can see what he meant by putting this thing in perspective. The incidents are listed in order of the most deaths, and the 1927 bombing in Bath, Michigan is number four. I was surprised to see how many other countries have experienced incidents like this over the years, since much of the media frenzy about the subject implies that the US is the only one. It would be interesting to see a comparison of the total number of killings per capita for each country. Not that it's a contest or anything like that, of course one death is too many but, like Old Dog said, it should be put in perspective.

I clicked on the Bath incident because it was the closest one to home, and also because it was the oldest. I wanted to see what something like that looked like with the mass media, the social media, and the ARs factored out of the equation. One thing it had in common with the more recent events was that the target was a mass gathering of people. The guy had a specific grudge against the school system because he was a member of the local school board and felt that the other members weren't paying enough attention to him. The Bath schools, previously a collection of one room schoolhouses, had recently been consolidated, putting all the kids in one building. This made it easier to effect mass casualties, which is probably why he chose that particular target. Minutes earlier, the guy had blown up his own house and associated farm buildings, probably because the mortgage was about to be foreclosed. Some time before that, he had murdered his wife, who was dying of tuberculosis. Suffice it to say, he had more than one thing on his mind when he planned all this. That's another thing this one had in common with the more recent incidents, extensive planning. Most of these guys are not acting impulsively, they have given this thing a lot of thought. It has occurred to me that it might not be correct to call somebody like that mentally ill, at least not in the legal sense. Anybody who can put such an elaborate plan together, and then carry it out, certainly must know what he's doing.

Uncle Ken advanced the idea of conducting medical experiments on mass murderers who are captured alive. That's kind of what I was getting at when I said something could be learned from them. At first I thought of dissecting their brains, but there are less invasive ways of getting information like that nowadays. I understand they have equipment that can virtually scan a brain all kinds of ways without harming the subject.