I Believe Obsession With Rules, More Than Racism, Motivated George Zimmerman and the Chapel Hill Killer

Anyone else notice the similarities between the Chapel Hill man who shot and killed his three Muslim neighbors, and George Zimmerman, the man who murdered Trayvon Martin.

People like to grab on to easy labels like “hate crime”and “racism” and “super predator” when talking about criminal motives underlying heinous crimes. But me, ex-bank robber and seasoned doer of unrighteous deeds, I say that it is the run-of-the-mill emotional insecurity of a control freak that underwrites these killings more than anything else.

But that’s me. I don’t like to grab the first sensational tag off the shelf when I try to understand killers and criminals.

So while people don’t readily see George Zimmerman in Craig Stephen Hicks of Chapel Hill, I see fundamental resemblances.

Both men have anger management issues. Each thought it was O.K. Corral cool to walk around their neighborhood strapped. Hicks knocked on doors and met a tow truck with gun in hand.

Both men were control freaks who wished they had a cop’s badge. Hicks had phoned a tow company so many times and reported out-of-bound vehicles that the tow company finally issued a “no-response” order for his calls. Zimmerman had been an official Neighborhood Watch captain who phoned his local police department 48 times.

These petty men studied the law. Hicks was studying to be a paralegal. Zimmerman was in college studying Criminal Justice.

Hicks and Zimmerman enjoyed policing their surroundings. They clearly enjoyed leaning on the law to buttress their bullying. And they finally took the law into their own hands.

One of the great fallacies about crime is that criminals are lawless.

I was a committed criminal who robbed 30 banks and spent 9 years behind bars. And I have to tell you that criminals, and prisoners most of all, are the most rule-obsessed people I’ve ever met. And that’s a high bar for me. I was raised in a southern Baptist fundamentalist home with a preacher for a dad. I’ve known some legalistic, mind every jot and tittle, Torah-technical people.

I was never more policed than when I got to prison and the prisoner-powers-that-be surveillanced the prisoner population and issued strong punitive edicts when one of us violated the Convict’s Code.

Criminals being obsessed with legalism makes total sense if you think about it for two seconds. How else can we celebrate our transgressions if we don’t know exactly where the line was that we were not supposed to cross? And what is a parking space if not a taboo boundary that Hicks could obsess over?

A heart does not need to house hate or racism to commit either of the killings Hicks and Zimmerman committed. It helps, don’t get me wrong. But I look into the murderous rage that once animated me and I see that I needed only to be intent on coercing people to behave in a way that made me feel superior and strongest when I could reduce them to puny victim status.