Thursday, December 06, 2007 Seares: Killings: random or cold-blood By Pachico A. Seares News Sense
HOW does drive-by shooting differ from execution-style shooting from a moving vehicle?
Both are tricky because the shooter must fire from a running car or motorcycle.
Ask Karlon Rama, news reporter, himself a shooter who can touch a gun as fondly as he caresses a woman.
Both require a mean bone in the gunman's body as the intent is to kill or maim. Ask the drive-by shooter of Oct. 4 who killed three and wounded four innocent bystanders on Cebu City streets.
The difference, maybe, is in choice of target.
The drive-by shooter doesn't intend to kill a specific person, just anyone who comes on sight.
In the alleged shooting spree by Aristotle Aves, casualties were people he didn't know and who did him no wrong.
Target is random. A man back-rides on a motorcyle and spews out gunfire as if he were some killing machine.
In god's list
But an assassin on a motorcycle intends to kill a specific person, someone in a freaking death god's list.
The motorcycle is for getaway but if the target can be taken out by gunfire from the vehicle, with little or no "collateral damage," then the salvaging becomes a drive-by job as well.
Aves' alleged victims stand out as casualties of the most wicked and mindless single incident in the city's recent history of violence.
They pale in number to victims of executioners who already murdered 180 petty crime suspects in the city. But the senselessness equally stuns.
The mayor condemns "paregla" killings but cheers cold-blood executions.
Odd how both acts---both criminal, cruel, and perverse---can draw clashing reactions from the same human being, the same believer in God.
