Hired Killers Among Us

Tom Horn was a unique and arguably the last of the old west personas that could be accurately portrayed as a last resort by the large cattle interests in Colorado and Wyoming. If someone was causing your cattle business problems, such as grazing sheep on cattle land, then call in Tom Horn to get it fixed. Tom fixed it with a rifle from ambush.

John Wesley Hardin is familiar to all Texans. His biography listed his life’s activities as cattleman, husband and father, prisoner, prison Sunday school superintendant, and attorney. He was also a quick-tempered killer with at least thirty known deaths by his hand. Hardin was known to have considered himself a pillar of society who only killed those that needed to be killed. (here)

Both Tom Horn and John Wesley Hardin were well known during the years before their deaths for who they were; one a killer for hire and the other as someone to step carefully with.  And this brings us to Dr. Kermit Gosnell.

Dr. Gosnell ran the Women’s Medical Society In Philadelphia. It was advertized as a women’s health clinic but as described in this article it was actually a death clinic. (here) Dr. Gosnell and some of his employees are charged with killing one adult woman and seven newborn babies. This doctor and some of his assistants used scissors to snip the spines of the newborns. Convicted murderers are treated with more compassion at their state executions than the innocent newborns that were delivered into his hands. The descriptions of the facilities are bad enough to sicken even the most hardened of individuals.  But the facilities are not the issue. At what point in our society did we decide that this kind of activity could go on for thirty years before it became so disgusting as to bring this “doctor” to trial? It was disgusting the first time the United States Supreme Court declared it legal. It was disgusting when people decided that a baby in the womb had no rights, not the basic right to life or the right to feel the love of a mother and father after being born. It was disgusting when the mother decided she had better things to do rather than be burdened with a baby. It was disgusting when the right to murder a baby became symbolic of women’s rights. It is equally disgusting and depraved that the issue that brought this case to light was because the babies were actually delivered. But why do we have to differentiate between these late term abortions and the ones that are performed as soon as the mother realizes she is pregnant? I guess the quicker this society decides to commit a murder the less heinous it must be. Dr. Gosnell, and I am sure there are more like him practicing their ghoulish brand of medicine, is just a point on a continuum of depravity that we will sink to when we stop valuing life.

The major news outlets are not covering the trial very closely. If they do it might become an embarrassment for the overall agenda for women and for the people who routinely seek their votes. Maybe we should find some way to equate these helpless human beings to baby seals. The seals seem to draw more sympathy than do infants.  

Tom Horn was hanged in Cheyenne in 1903. People were unsure of his actual guilt as to the murder for which he was convicted. The jury decided that it did not matter that much because he was surely guilty of many other killings. John Wesley Hardin died instantly when shot in the back by an assassin. It was the same assassin that he had hired to kill another man. We don’t know yet what the jury will provide for Kermit Gosnell but he has probably committed more murders at the behest of would be mothers who sought out is expertise than Horn or Hardin combined.