'Before turning the gun on himself'

Murder-suicide never becomes humdrum but it has become regular. The black comedy industry has noticed, and comedian Doug Stanhope titled his 2012 album Before Turning the Gun on Himself. Journalists have noticed, too, and are forever looking for new ways to phrase the headline. In our local paper yesterday, the headline read, succinctly, “Gunman kills 8, self at Czech restaurant.”

I Googled the phenomenon and found example after example, including massacres such as the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, when a gunman killed 32 people “before turning the gun on himself”; the 2012 shooting in Newtown, Conn., where a young man killed 26 “before turning the gun on himself”; the 1989 Montreal massacre, where a man killed 14 women “before turning the gun on himself.”

You have to ask yourself: Why would a person do that? Why would a man turn the gun on himself? Facile psychological explanations will not suffice. Maslow and company tells us man’s primary instinct is self-preservation. Psychiatry cannot have it both ways. Either it’s self-preservation or it’s not. To multiply qualifications makes their theories look like patchwork.

Better to consider the biblical pointers. Judas invites demonic influence into his life (see John 13:2, 27) and he ends up killing himself. The demon-possessed man in the land of the Gerasenes keeps cutting on himself, a slow form of suicide (Mark 5:1–5).

And see the frenzied haste of Judas’ demonic suicide: “And throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, [Judas] departed, and he went and hanged himself” (Matthew 27:5, ESV).

The secular world has evicted demons as an explanation of human events. It leaves them without a way to make sense of much of the human drama. The grand finale of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s 1999 shooting spree at Columbine was to “turn the gun on themselves.” That reportedly was preceded by a rapturous shout, in unison, of “One! Two! Three!” and then the sound of gunfire.

There is something—or someone—that overtakes the natural instinct of survival. Might it not be the one who prowls like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour? Having found an entry point in some feckless soul, by that person’s flirting with the dark side in some way, might Satan be using him to take out as many image-bearers of God as he can, then contemptuously dispenses with his foolish instrument?

There is a sound of rejoicing among the angels in heaven when even one soul repents. Can’t you imagine that there is a counterpart celebration in the nether regions over murders and massacres with self-destruction being the cherry on the top? We trifle with the toys of hell at our own risk.