I believe that as long as I didn't have time to *think* about it, I could kill another human being. I have much too much imagination. We are all capable of it, IMO, but for each of us the circumstances precipitating it would be different.

Fo me it would be a towering desperate rage that would do it. And the event that triggered it would not necessarily be a very large thing.

Once, during a time in my life when I was desperate, and dependent on my bicycle for transportation, and had just spent the week's grocery money to get my bicycle tires replaced after someone had slashed them, I went out the next morning to find them slashed again! I was later thankful I didn't have an UZI because I was so full of despair and rage that if I'd had one I would have ran the block's length to the corner of Queen and Bathurst and let loose at everything that moved. At the time, I had to call a counsellor to "talk me down".

It was that proverbial "last straw" feeling. I would also kill if I was trapped.

In a high-school episode once, I almost killed a girl who through a misunderstanding, jumped on me to try and beat me up while I was sitting in the back seat of a convertable. I hardly felt any of her blows, my blood was up so quickly. I just reached up and had her by the throat and started squeezing. She had the bruises from that for weeks. I'm pretty sure I would have killed her if she hadn't wrenched herself free. Strangely enough, before that I thought of myself as a weakling, and that episode gave me more confidence as a whole. It being in self-defense, it was an exhiliarating experience.

I get that rage whenever I see an adult hurting a small child. I've got that reasonable under control now, though. I've learned that it often makes things worse for the child if you interfere with parental brutality or harrassment.

On the other hand, I also believe that every human has within them the capacity for compassion, true remorse, to make restitution/penance, etc. So if I have the chance to think about it the need to anihilate the perpetrator subsides.

~ Jande