‘Boredom’ Was not the Reason Behind Chris Lane’s Murder (+video)

Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

The mischaracterization of the alleged violence by Chancey Luna, Michael Jones and James Edwards began when one of the trio claimed they had hunted down and shot dead Australian Chris Lane because they were “bored.”

The statement is so devoid of humanity and so headline-ready that the media seized upon it as a literal and complete explanation for why these three accused killers acted so inhumanely.

But the statement is a smokescreen. Boredom—of the kind sane people experience—had nothing, whatsoever, to do with Lane’s death and explains nothing about how it happened.

When normal people are bored, they go to the movies, go shopping or skateboarding or take a drive to the beach. Only when people are severely psychologically disordered do they think up murder as an antidote to boredom. Only when extraordinarily disordered patterns of thought, feeling or perception fill one’s mind does the vacuum of boredom draw someone to the idea of using a gun to shoot a stranger in the head…

So why would these three allegedly do this if it had nothing to do with boredom? Probably because Chris Lane, a strong man running the streets on a bright day, was as good a symbol as any of what they had lost: their humanity. They had lost the capacity to feel for others. They could not perceive the suffering of Lane during his death, nor of his family members after his death. They had lost that singular, defining human quality called empathy.

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