Because It’s Chemistry, Not Partisanship, That Leaves A Hole In The Heart – Satire In Scapegoat Theater

Yesterday, I posted this as a response to the blathering of Yahya. Today, I’m going for a gedankenexperiment that shows how specious this entire argument is.

Does Republican partisanship breed/attract serial killers? Let’s look at a few:

Gary Ridgway - On 5 November 2003 Gary Leon Ridgway confessed to 48 murders in Seattle's King County, making him the most prolific convicted serial killer in United States history. Ridgway grew up in the Seattle area and worked as a truck painter at the time of the killings, most of which occurred in a 19-month period beginning in 1982. The victims had been strangled and their bodies dumped in ravines and near highways in the vicinity of the Green River in northwestern Washington. The so-called Green River Killer chose mostly prostitutes and runaways. Eventually law enforcement officials released a list of 49 names they believed to be victims of the same killer -- although some of those listed were missing and presumed dead. In 1984 Ridgway was identified as a suspect (he had been seen with one of the victims shortly before she went missing), but the investigation didn't turn up any hard evidence against him. In 2001 he was arrested and charged with four counts of murder after being linked by DNA evidence from a saliva sample he had provided in 1987. In March of 2003 he was charged with 3 more murders in King County, Washington. His guilty plea in November 2003 was part of a deal that spared him the death penalty and gave him a lifelong prison term. Ridgway, who after his arrest led police to four more bodies, confessed to killing 42 of the 49 victims on the list, plus six others not on the list. The Green River Killer is also suspected of murders in Oregon and British Columbia, but Ridgway's 2003 trial did not address those crimes.

Dennis Lynn Rader (born March 9, 1945) is an American serial killer who murdered 10 people in Sedgwick County (in and around Wichita, Kansas), between 1974 and 1991. He was known as the BTK killer (or the BTK strangler), which stands for "bind, torture and kill" and describes his modus operandi. He sent boastful letters describing the details of the killings to police and to local news outlets during the period of time in which the murders took place. After a long hiatus in the 1990s, he resumed sending letters in 2004, leading to his 2005 arrest and subsequent conviction.

Ted Bundy was a clean-cut, smooth-talking serial killer who confessed to raping and killing more than 20 young women between 1974 and 1978. Executed in Florida in 1989 for three murders, his crimes began in Washington state in 1974. Bundy committed his attacks on women while leading a seemingly normal life, first in the Seattle area as a local Republican party campaigner, then in Salt Lake City as a law student at the University of Utah. He was arrested during a traffic stop in 1975, after police found evidence linking him to a kidnapping in Utah and a murder in Colorado. While in jail in Utah, investigators in Washington and Colorado pegged Bundy as a suspect in the disappearances and murders of several others. He was convicted of kidnapping in Utah in 1976 and sentenced to 15 years in jail, but he escaped in late 1977 and made his way to Florida, using the name Chris Hagen. Shortly after arriving in Tallahassee, Bundy attacked four women in a sorority house at Florida State University, killing two. A few weeks later he raped and killed a 12 year-old girl in Lake City, Florida. Bundy was finally apprehended when a Pensacola police officer arrested him for driving a stolen car.

Bundy went on trial for murder, proclaiming his innocence and defending himself in court. The televised trial showed that Bundy could look and talk just like a lawyer; many viewers couldn't believe a poised, normal-looking guy could be guilty of such brutal crimes. After Bundy was convicted and sentenced to death, he reluctantly began to confess to previous unsolved murders, saying an "entity" inside him drove him to rape and kill. In a failed effort to delay his execution he offered to provide more details and confessions, but the state of Florida electrocuted him on 24 January 1989. On the eve of his execution, Bundy was interviewed by Christian media personality James Dobson. Under Dobson's questioning, Bundy claimed an "addiction" to pornography led him to commit violent crimes.

There we have three examples of serial killers who were by their own admission, Republican. Bundy campaigned for one, Rader was voted in on that ticket, and Ridgway is said to have confessed to the arresting sheriff that if the officer ran he’d vote for him, since he was a Republican [citation needed]. Using exceptionally specious logic, we can concoct that the GOP attracts crazy-ass killers.

We can of course, employing the Texas sharp-shooter fallacy, discount the misses (or as I like to call them, the non-selected highlights). John Wayne Gacy was a Democrat. Gilles de Rais,  Countess Bathory and Prince Vlad were all European monarchs. Dahmer’s political affiliation is unknown, likely GOP. I can’t seem to find any Libertarian or Green Party serial killers. Andrei Chikatilo was likely a communist, but for the most part Wikipedia and Answers.com don’t mention a political affiliation. And why not?

Because it’s STUPID, that’s why.

Because suicides and serial killers are the result of chemistry, not ideology. There’s as much a causal link between psychopaths and political parties as there is between evolution and teen suicides. Which is precisely in the ZERO percentile.

There, that’s my nickel’s worth. Flip it or skip it, it’s up to you.