THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Bob Herbert takes a look at us in light of the recent spate of killings fueled by hate. We may talk of them as one of a kind, lone wolfs, aberrations, but are they really?

The problem when we think in terms of freaks and aberrations is that there are so many of them, which calls into question just how freakish or aberrational they really are. Was it an aberration when, according to authorities, Scott Roeder went into the lobby of a Lutheran church in Wichita two weeks ago and shot Dr. George Tiller to death? Hardly. The murder of Dr. Tiller, who was the nation’s most prominent provider of so-called late-term abortions, was the fourth assassination of an abortion provider in the U.S. since 1993.

Three Pittsburgh police officers were murdered in April by a man with a high-powered rifle who, according to authorities, was later linked to racist and anti-Semitic items posted on white supremacist Web sites. The man was identified as 22-year-old Richard Poplawski. According to the Anti-Defamation League, Poplawski, who wore a Nazi-style tattoo, believed Zionists were running the world and that President Obama was planning to crack down on gun ownership.

The madness is not limited to white supremacists by any means. A 23-year-old U.S. Army private, William Andrew Long, who had just completed basic training, was shot to death on June 1 outside a recruiting center in a suburb of Little Rock. Investigators said the man accused of killing him, a Muslim convert named Abdulhakim Muhammad, asserted that the killing was justified because of the treatment of Muslims by the U.S. military.

In 2002, a pair of snipers — John Allen Muhammad and his teenage accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, both black — spread terror as they roamed the Washington, D.C., area cold-bloodedly killing people. Their motives were a jumble, but a primary motive, according to Malvo, was to kill white people. Ten people were murdered before the pair was captured.

The truth, of course, is that there is nothing aberrational about hatred and murderous violence in the U.S. They are two of the most prominent touchstones of the culture, monumentally tragic flaws that have permeated the nation’s history from its earliest moments and that plague us still today.

These people are woven into the fabric of our daily lives and are as mainstream as Beck, O'Reilly and Farrakhan.