Obsessive Idea Of Shooting An Elephant

Recently, to our horror, random mass shooting incidents successively occurred one after another in the United States. Above all, one of those happened in California is still fresh in our memory. On November 14th, 2017, the armed criminal, Kevin Neal, got killed by police after he committed mass shooting at multiple locations that killed 4 people and injured 14 people including 2 elementary school students. On the evening before the day, it already began secretly. He murdered his wife at home, hiding the body under the floor of his house, then went on the rampage shooting on the following day. The local authority was fully aware of his mental unsteadiness since many of his neighbors claimed that they were threatened by Kevin Neal. Furthermore,
The protagonist of George Owen’s “Shooting an elephant” demonstrated that people under the pressures could prioritize self-protection over morality, there is no wonder that if his imaginary situations that the obsessive idea has given to him could have pushed him to being armed and plan on the first attack before the neighbor’s attack. According to the New York Post, his mother said that he said, “All of a sudden, now I’m on a cliff and there’s nowhere to go. No matter where I go for help here, I get nobody who will help me. All they are doing is trying to execute me here.”. His words indicated how cornered and desperate he was. In his mind, he was more endangered than the main character in George Owen’s essay was. Consequently, his self-overprotection, which overgrew by the charge of the assault and the restraining order, for avoiding his unfavorable situations resulted in the havoc caused by his
One of his neighbors says, "He was a smart guy. He was playing a game of chess with police. Someone would call because he was shooting. And Neal would stop just before police got there. When the cops were gone, he'd start again."(CNN) Considering that he showed his sensible attitude that he fully recognized that he would need to comply the authority or laws and could not resist against the orders from the authority once he got caught of it on sight, his cognitive function and rationality were still working and not influenced by his mental issues. Accordingly, he must have realized that the forthcoming trial might convict him. In “Crito”, Socrates says, “what we ought to consider is not so much what people in general will say about us but how we stand with the expert in right and wrong, the one authority, who represents the actual truth.”(908) While Socrates exercised his free will to comply the authority’s judgement with his moral responsibilities, Kevin acted out of free will to escape from the authority’s judgement that would find him