The Lonely Gunman

From TODAY, Voices

Wednesday November 26, 2008

 

By Dr James Dobson

 

His mother was a dominating woman who gave him no affection, no love, and no discipline during his early years, and other children had very little to do with him.

 

A school psychologist commented that he probably didn’t even know the meaning of the word “love”. He later married a Russian girl, but she also held him in contempt. She could outfight him and she learned to bully him. Finally, she forced him to leave.

 

After days of loneliness, he went home, fell on his knees, and literally begged her to take him back. He wept at her feet, but she laughed at him and made fun of his sexual impotency in front of a friend.

 

Finally, he pleaded no more. No one wanted him. No one had ever wanted him. The next day, he was a strangely different man. He arose, went to the garage, and took down a rifle that he had hidden there. He carried it with him to his newly acquired job at a book storage building. And from a window on the sixth floor of that building, shortly after noon on Nov 22, 1963, he shot two bullets into the head of United States President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

 

Lee Harvey Oswald, the rejected, hopeless failure, killed the man who, more than any other man on earth, embodied all the success and beauty and wealth and family affection which Oswald lacked.

 

And in firing that rifle, he utilised the one skill that he had learned in his entire, miserable lifetime.