Guns don?t kill people, debt collectors kill people?

On Tuesday, August 3, Omar S. Thornton, a union driver for Hartford Distributors in Manchester, Conn., agreed to quit his job after a brief disciplinary hearing during which his employers presented video surveillance footage of him stealing beer along his delivery route over the course of a few weeks.

After signing a resignation letter Mr. Thornton excused himself from the meeting room, walked to the office kitchen, retrieved two 9mm handguns he had stowed in his lunchbox, and began shooting.  A short time later eight of Hartford’s 70 employees had been murdered.  Then Mr. Thornton turned one of the guns on himself.

Accounts of the killings were published in newspapers and broadcast on television networks across the country this week.  The devastating story of an irrational act of violence has been more or less the same no matter where you heard it.  But a New York Times article on Wednesday set out to impose some semblance of logic on events that, by their nature and because of their final outcome, defy reason.  The newspaper decided to implicate debt collectors in the premeditated murder of eight people.

The Times story opens with this paragraph:

“He was bankrupt by age 24, when, court filings show, his only worldly possessions were $250 worth of clothing and $600 in a checking account. Debt collectors hounded him for years.”

In addition to his financial troubles, the article recounts Mr. Thornton’s past problems with unstable personal relationships, job change, and alleged racism at Hartford Distributors.

As a kind of journalistic insurance policy on the cause-and-effect inferences posited above, the article goes on to say that “None of this adds up to explain why” Thornton made the disastrous choices that he did on August 3.  I would be satisfied if that were the end of the story—in other words, the end of the non-story.  Because no one now can know for sure why Thornton fatally shot eight of his co-workers and then himself.

But the article goes on.  So the story continues.  And it’s one that conveys an unambiguous but nonetheless false message: the debt collection industry is to blame for these senseless deaths.

In the middle of the story, Times reporters Christine Haughney and Nate Schweber write:

“But the financial troubles resurfaced. About three or four years ago, Mr. Mack said, Mr. Thornton started receiving calls from debt collectors. Not long afterward, Mr. Mack recalled, he saw Mr. Thornton sitting at the kitchen table with Ms. Hannah as they shopped for a handgun on the Internet. Mr. Thornton said that he wanted the gun “just for protection,” Mr. Mack recalled.”

Debt collectors + “not long afterword” + guns = murder.

And the article concludes with this sentence: “Hours later [after the incident], Mr. Mack [a former roommate of the alleged gunman until the spring of 2010] said, in the house that they had shared, a creditor called for Mr. Thornton.”

If true, that’s an uncanny coincidence.  And it sounds poignant and it sells newspapers, but it’s far from showing causality.

As noted above, the appalling incident at Hartford Distributors this week has been widely reported; I doubt this blog is the first exposure you’ve had to the story.  A greater number of people probably overlooked the New York Times story quoted above as just another version of tragic events.  

But the Times article wasn’t really about the violent murder of eight Americans, victims of a profoundly disturbed individual.

The story created a myth about a lone victim: Mr. Omar Thornton, a man with debts, a man with guns.  A casualty of the debt collection industry spun from a fable told time and time again.

How disrespectful of the lives lost and many other lives destroyed by Thornton than to place the smoking gun in the hands of the ARM industry.

Michael Klozotsky is Managing Editor of insideARM.com. He can be reached by email.