Good person?

I disagree that someone who shoots up his office is a “good person.” You hear this type of thing a lot after someone commits some awful crime: Reporters will interview a person close to the perpetrator, who will vouch (with qualifications) for the person’s character.

This happened again after that guy from Delaware killed his coworkers in Maryland. On the news, they had someone who knew the guy and she said something to the effect of “he’s a good person who did a bad thing.”

I’m sure she was in shock and trying to work her way through it, and I don’t know how I’d deal with it if someone I knew, and thought was a good person, did something like this. I just disagree. Isn’t a mass shooting enough to tell us that this guy is a bad person? He might be good in other areas, but on the scale of life, murder weighs that scale down pretty low in the direction of “bad.”

I’m not going to delve too deeply into human nature in something I dashed off during five idle minutes at work, but I don’t believe you judge people’s character by what’s in their hearts. Nobody knows what’s in their hearts. All we know is what they do, and that’s a better indicator of character. If you murder a bunch of people, you forfeit your right to be seen as a good person. I think what you do makes you a good or bad person, not the other way around.

If it’s unfair for me to think this way of this shooter, oh well. There are several families in Maryland planning funerals this week that we can talk to about fairness.