A woman fatally shoots her 20-year old son before turning the gun on herself. Classic murder-suicide, right?
It's all in the mind of the beholder.
Mostly. Of course, there are two little twists. First, the woman’s motivation. The long and short of it — I pity Marie Moore. Really.
What she had done was horrendous, unforgivable, and if there’s a good thing in all of this it’s that she did turn the gun on herself. I am not even talking from the society’s standpoint. It’s not about us, taxpayers, having to shoulder the brunt of trial and subsequent treatment. It’s about this mentally disturbed mother — but mother nonetheless, Mother with a capital “M”, albeit in an altogether distorted font, possibly Wingdings, in anyone’s mind but hers — being able to live with herself had the hospital, in which she’d died following the incident, managed to save her life.
And based on her suicide notes to her boyfriend, no, I really don’t think she could have. Whatever delusions drove her to this, I imagine, unlike in the case of Susan Smith, the decision hadn’t been easy — nor geared toward her own benefit. She had been trying to save her son, however misguided the means. “I’m so sorry,” Marie Moore, 44, wrote several times. “I had to send my son to Heaven and myself to Hell.”
I don’t know where either of them will end up. According to human laws, mental illness is invariably a mitigating circumstance. Whether it holds true in the afterlife, there are authorities far better equipped than I to, if not answer this, then, at least, venture a more educated guess.
Not that educated guesses seem to be paying off that well, at least, in this tragic story. Because the second twist is that Mary Moore didn’t just wake up one morning after a lifetime of rational decisions and decided to take her mommy duties to a whole different level. A self-described “anti-Christian”, she had previously attempted suicide, had been involuntarily committed in 2002, and banned from the same gun range, at which the shooting took place, at around the same time.
Among her effects, there had been found audio tapes, in which she had described hearing voices, one of them, supposedly, God’s, urging to commit these horrific acts.
“I have to die and go to hell so there can be a thousand years peace on earth,” she explains in the two tapes. “God’s turned me into the Anti-Christ… I’m a good person, but the Devil and God turned me into the worst person in the world. I’m so ashamed. And I’m so afraid. And I’ll pay forever and ever.”
Amidst ramblings of having spent long stints in psychiatric hospitals and hallucinations that had her convinced at times that she was being buried alive, eaten by ants, burned at the stake and gassed, she adds: “I’m sorry to leave you like this. It’s a horrifying thing to do.”
And yet, Larry Anderson, a manager at Shoot Straight, from which Mary had been banned 7 years previously, initially claimed it’s unclear whether the Moores had been to the range before. More, before renting out their guns, the range requires that customers fill out a questionnaire that includes a section on whether they have ever been convicted of a felony or been declared mentally unstable — but it has no way of verifying the information.
Defending the range’s policies, says Anderson: “If someone acts right, we have to assume they are right.”
“Sometimes, like what happens Sunday, you have no control,” Anderson states. “There’s nothing you can do to prevent it.”
But is it the case? Starting from simply limiting the renters from having interaction with anyone, personnel and family members included, until their weapon is returned, there could have been, very much so.
That said, who should be held ultimately accountable for the shooting?
The range, for failing to conduct a thorough background check? Or is is we, as voters, for not demanding our government institute policies that would make it illegal for operators like Anderson to “assume” before indiscriminately handing out weapons?
Either way, two people are dead. And for the life of me, pardon the pun, I cannot blame Mrs. Moore for what is clearly the failure of authorities to prevent her from having access to items too dangerous to be handled by folks in her mental state. That — and, of course, the the authorities and the medical community for failing to properly follow up on her progress after her involuntary psychiatric treatments.
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