Raoul Moat, a bodybuilder who lives in Northumbria, obtained a gun and went on a shooting spree on Saturday, wounding his girlfriend and killing her new lover, a martial arts instructor who was shot down when he ran outside to confront the armed man. The girlfriend is expected to survive. Later, Moat wrote a lengthy diatribe about how he has lost everything and intends to keep killing – targeting police officers in particular – until he is dead. He made good on his promise to attack cops by shooting one through the window of a police car. The officer was critically injured, but is currently in stable condition.
Prior to the rampage, Moat’s girlfriend, the mother of his three-year-old child, had taunted him by saying that she was sleeping with a policeman. After the shootings, she issued a plea retracting her words, saying that she had only told him she was sleeping with a policeman because she was “frightened.”
Moat’s manifesto has not been released to the public because of the sensitive nature of the information it contains.
Given the chaotic state of sexual relations today, these incidents are inevitable. There is no avoiding the fact that certain unstable individuals, such as Mr. Moat, will crack and take violent action over jealousy or a sense of betrayal. If there is anything remarkable, it is the fact that it happens so rarely despite the pressure so many people face in the chaotic sexual marketplace, which touches on some of the deepest nerves in the human psyche.
For a dystopian view of a society in which bloodshed and murder over sexual rivalries was commonplace, one need only read the blood and gore-soaked annals of pre-Christian European literature. Perhaps we are returning to such an age, where women’s proclivity to seek out violent, brutal men for drama and excitement will lend a crimson cast to our lives.
