Passe

It was my wife, CEO of rainbows and wrapping things in white light at our house, who suggested that being an ax murderer is passe. "Who does that anymore?" she asked in her own inimitable fashion. This may have been a line of questioning brought about from watching one too many episodes of The Walking Dead. For those of you who are unfamiliar with that show, there are a bunch of survivors of a zombie apocalypse fighting off the requisite zombies that come along with that apocalypse. Over time, these rugged individuals have determined that in the interest of saving ammunition and not wanting to stir up a nest of shambling flesh eaters, they will dispatch the monsters with knives, hammers or even an ax. Practical and efficient, the guns are saved for those moments when they are overwhelmed or if they meet up with other survivor types who want to take their guns or canned tomatoes.
Technically, this zombie killing can't really be classified as murder. If you happen to be a member of the undead, killing you a second time falls into the realm of double jeopardy and as a result. all those lopped off limbs and crushed skulls add up to self-preservation instead of jail time. The idea that zombies are, or were, people too gets little air time. Ax murdering is now pest control.
Someone forgot to tell James Harris Jackson.
Mister Jackson, who is introduced in most news accounts of his crime as "an army vet," killed sixty-six year old Timothy Caughman on Wednesday. He did this with a knife. In New York City. Jackson said he took a bus from Maryland to New York because it is "the media capital of the world," and he wanted to make a statement. The fact that Mister Caughman was black may have something to do with his statement, but it might also have had something to do with how far from the track Mister Jackson's trolley had slipped. Eschewing the assault weapons and the current weapon of choice among insane nitwits, motor vehicles, James Harris Jackson apparently wanted the world to see his willingness to carve up a defenseless fellow human being as some sort of declaration of racial superiority. He took the time to make all his insane nitwit justification on a laptop that he carried along with the cutlery he intended to use in support of this insane nitwit justification.
Jackson hadn't made the leap that some of us out here already have: The survivors of the zombie apocalypse are the Walking Dead, not the zombies themselves. Apparently, he has been dead for a long time already. Taking someone with him is adding insult to idiocy.