Have you seen that vigilante man?

Have you seen that vigilante man?

Have you seen that vigilante man?

I been hearin’ his name all over the land.

—Woody Guthrie

A vigil on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; February 11, 2015. Photograph by Travis Dove / The New York Times/Redux

Let’s try to imagine that Craig Stephen Hicks, who massacred three of his neighbors in a Chapel Hill condominium on Tuesday, really did it for no other reason than to settle a difference of opinion about parking-lot etiquette.

That’s how the police are explaining Hicks’s decision to invade the home of the twenty-three-year-old Deah Shaddy Barakat, his twenty-one-year-old wife, Yusor Mohamad Abu-Salha, and her younger sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, and shoot them repeatedly—in the head, according to their family members.

That’s Hicks’s wife’s story, too. She held a press conference yesterday to counter the popular perception that her husband killed the neighbors on account of their religion. His victims were observant Muslims (the two women wore head scarves) and Hicks, who called himself an “anti-theist” on Facebook, had expressed a passionate loathing for all faiths and their followers. His wife wanted everyone to believe that these facts were irrelevant. “Parking dispute,” Mrs. Hicks said: that’s all there was to what she called “this incident.”

“Isolated incident” was the preferred verbiage of Ripley Rand, the local U.S. attorney. Rand said that he saw no reason to treat the targeting and assassination of these three Muslims as “part of a targeted campaign against Muslims”—as if a broader conspiracy were needed for Hicks’s crime to have broader significance.

So there you have it. Some people are sensitive about parking. One such person stood his ground. Now three young innocents are dead, and he’s being held without bond in the county jail. A lamentable affair, but, told like that, shorn of all context, it’s not unlike a song on the radio, folkloric. Our imaginations are primed to grasp it.

What’s hard to get one’s mind around is that everyone who’s singing this tune—the police, the wife, the prosecutor—seems to think that it’s reassuring. Getting blown away by a neighbor just because he’s pissed off at you for some ridiculous reason has become the equivalent of a natural disaster in our country, with our gun culture. It’s got nothing to do with the killer’s ideology, or with the victim’s identity. That’s the thinking. And, with this “parking” alibi, we’re being asked to imagine that these killings are a private tragedy, not some big public deal—not terrorism, not even like terrorism. We’re being told to believe that the vigilante killing of three young Americans is socially and politically meaningless.

It seems we are also supposed to be relieved by the fact that Hicks, who carried a gun to earlier confrontations with his neighbors, was not a religious fanatic. Are we then supposed to ignore the fact that he was an anti-religious fanatic, who was said to have taunted the women he later killed for dressing according to their traditions and beliefs? We are told that he was in favor of gay marriage, as if that negated his militant intolerance of others. He spent most of his time on Facebook heaping contempt on Christians, who are more numerous by far in Hicks’s neck of the woods than Muslims. And yet with law-enforcement sounding like Hicks-family spin doctors, we are being urged to consider this murderer as a figure of all-embracing American assimilation—a man who did not care who they were but hated them as he would hate anyone and everyone, equally and without fear or favor, for the way they parked.

Far more Americans are killed each year by the shooters in our midst like Craig Stephen Hicks than have ever been killed by all the jihadist terrorist outfits that have ever stalked this earth. That’s the price, or so the rhetoric goes, of our wild freedom. But maybe to understand the Chapel Hill murders better we need to imagine how it would be playing out if it were the other way around—if some gun-toting Muslim, with a habit of posting hate messages about secular humanists, took it upon himself to execute a defenseless family of them in their home.