I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

by Jason Pargin

who Hunter was now pretty sure had started drinking even before she’d left for the airport. “He believed he’d been screwed over in a local zoning dispute. It had to do with a concrete plant that was going to block the entrance to his muffler shop. In response to all this, he spent a year and a half welding nine tons of armor to a bulldozer.” “Oh, the Killdozer guy! Yeah, I heard about that. I kind of like his style.” “Yes, the Killdozer guy. He dedicated his whole life to turning the vehicle into a tank, including gun ports to fire in every direction. He created a list of targets and welded himself into the cockpit—there was literally no exit; it was a suicide mission from the start. Then, well, he went on a rampage. For two hours, he tore ass around town, flattening the businesses and homes of everyone who’d ever wronged him, destroying thirteen buildings in the process. SWAT teams riddled the vehicle with bullets, Heemeyer just laughed it off—at one point, they supposedly considered calling in the National Guard to take out the Killdozer with an attack helicopter. He eventually got stuck in the basement of one of his targets and had no means to extract himself. There was a gunshot from inside, and that was that—Heemeyer had shot himself in the head after having, in his mind, resolved his zoning dispute. Well, I have this theory that we have been quietly building a society full of Heemeyers, seemingly normal people with middle-class lives and brains full of retribution fa...