The Killing Season

It is apparent to me, that Americans have suffered through a regular recurrence of violence ever since its founding in 1776. There seems to be a pattern in which random acts of mayhem seem more prevalent during the month of April. Personally, I do not believe that it is a coincidence that the enigmatic poet and playwright, T.S. Eliot, called April the cruelest of months. 

I found an essay in Shutterstock that argues for the veracity of this bold statement. They believe that the fact that the first day of April is labeled April’s Fool’s Day sets the stage for all kinds of aggression and chicanery. Add to this the beginning of Daylight Saving Time, which usually begins in April, giving pranksters, both peaceful and not, an extra hour of daylight in which to inflict their havoc and violence. *

Part of this fact can be attributed to the extra hour of daylight that might negatively impact the population’s sleep habits. Something more sinister seems to be happening as well. Criminologists and terror experts recognize a seasonality of violence, a cluster of attacks that begin in April, the month which initiates, what they term as The Killing Season. 

They begin with The Waco Siege in April of 1993, led by David Koresch and his Branch Davidians. Ensuing Federal troop attacks resulted in the death of 76 Davidians. Two years later there was the Oklahoma Bombing with Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who planted a truck bomb in front of a federal building in downtown Oklahoma City, which killed just under 170 people. The Columbine School Massacre took place on April 20th of 1999, killing 14 students and teachers.

On April 16th, 2007, South Korean-born Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people during the Virginia Tech Massacre. The Boston Marathon Bombing occurred on April 15th of 2013 with three fatalities and hundreds injured, while the Overland Park Jewish Community Center shooting in Kansas took place on April 13th of 2014 and also listed three fatalities. The Franklin Regional High School suffered the onslaught of 16 year old Alex Hribal who stabbed and slashed 20 students and a service guard in Murrysville, Pennsylvania, just five days later.

Weather also seems to play a factor here since high temperatures often increase metabolism, which is linked to the fight vs flight syndrome that is ingrained in all human beings. Overheated people simply have trouble thinking clearly and their inner agitation might encourage them to be violent.

Another reason April begins this bloody season is because a number of notable dates are sprinkled throughout the month, such as the birthday of Adolph Hitler on April 20th, the day Harris and Klebold carried out the Columbine attack. Many radicals organize group celebrations which can often foster violence against perceived enemies, real or not. This seems to fit the motivation of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building two years to the day after the Feds lay siege to the Branch Davidian’s compound in Waco, Texas, killing 82.

Boston Marathon Bombers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev specifically chose Boston’s Patriots’ Day because it was a Massachusetts state holiday, commemorating the first battles of the Revolutionary War, so they could rub salt into Boston’s crippling wounds. 

The Killing Season might miss the underlying truth that these attacks have happened in other months as well. Violent assaults in the United States date back to at least 1920 when Wall Street was bombed on September 16th. To this day, nothing is known about the perpetrators of this heinous crime, which killed 38 people.

Foreign terrorism did not become a serious threat until the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. While they failed in their attempt to bring down the trade center buildings, it did kill six people, including a pregnant woman and caused over 1000 injuries. More importantly, the attack demonstrated the feasibility of carrying out a larger attack eight years later.

It was 19 members of the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda, who created national havoc on September 11, 2001, when they highjacked four American passenger planes, crashing two of them into the Twin Towers. The third plane hit the Pentagon in Virginia while a fourth plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field, reputed to have been the valorous efforts of passengers whose deaths probably saved hundreds of lives. Most people believe it was destined for either the White House or the Capitol Building.

As for casualties, the official death toll was 2977 people, which included 441 first responders, 343 firefighters, 246 passengers and crew on the four airline planes, 55 members of the military, 71 law enforcement personnel and eight paramedics. Since that terrible day, around 10,000 of the first responders have contracted cancer-related illnesses. Since then, those figures have, more than likely, skyrocketed to 48,000 first responders who have contracted cancer, triggered by their toxic exposure on 9/11.

The President of the United States has been the target of many assassination attempts and countless thousands of death threats over the course of American History. To date there have been 17 direct attacks against our presidents or presidential candidates. Of our 45 men who have served as our 47 presidents, four were assassinated, beginning with Abraham Lincoln in 1865 followed by James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901 and John F. Kennedy in 1963. 

Of the other 13 attempts, Ronald Reagan was the only sitting president to have been wounded in an assassination attempt. Former President Theodore Roosevelt was wounded during his Third Party run for president in 1912 as was Donald Trump in 2024. They are the only former presidents to have been wounded while campaigning for re-election to the presidency. Reagan was seriously wounded by assassin John Hinckley while Trump’s right ear was grazed from a rifle bullet from 20-year old Thomas Matthew Crooks in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Our history is replete with a long list of other failed attempts on a president’s life, dating back to 1835. The most notorious include Richard Lawrence’s two-gun attempt to murder President Andrew Jackson. From just a few feet, Lawrence’s first gun jammed and the other misfired. Three weeks before Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1932, an Italian assassin, named Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots at him, missing FDR but fatally wounding Anton Cermak, the mayor of Chicago, who was sitting next to him in their vehicle. 

In 1950, President Harry S Truman dodged an attempt on his life by two Puerto Rican gunmen, wielding automatic weapons, who killed a White House policeman. President Gerald Ford, the only president not elected to his office, suffered two attempts on his life in 1975. In October of 1994, an assassin fired 29 bullets into the White House while Bill Clinton was in residence without injury. 

This was followed by an attempt in 2005 on the life of President George W. Bush with a grenade in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. The small explosive landed just 61 feet from the president but fortunately failed to detonate. Six years later, Barack Obama was not in residence when an assailant fired eight rounds into the White House. Since 1971 it has been a federal crime to even threaten a president of the United States.

Other candidates to our highest office have also died or been wounded at the hands of an assailant. In 1968, JFK’s brother Bobby was shot and killed by gunman Sirhan Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles during a presidential campaign event. The Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, was shot and seriously wounded at a shopping center during a campaign stop for his run for the presidency four years later. 

This is, however, as we all know, par for the course. I am afraid that when a famous person dies at the hand or hands of people who have no respect for human life, nor the political and legal process, it just feeds the public’s need for more sensational distraction. The phrase, It happens every spring, used to remind us of baseball. Now it seems more like a symbol of our amoral times and the constant of a political assassination.

*It was H. Rap Brown, a black activist who said in 1967 that ‘Violence…is as American as cherry pie.’