Howard Unruh

Further Reading for Howard Unruh

Mass Killers: Inside the Minds of Men Who Murder by Katherine Ramsland

Rampage by Harold Schechter

Believe it or not, there used to be a time in America where unfuckable dweebs with bowl cuts and wire-rimmed glasses didn’t go on shooting rampages at least once a week. These mythical days of yore took place long before the age of nihilistic blackpilled losers, 8chan and semi-automatic rifles with high capacity magazines. Before people made jokes about “going postal”, before Charles Whitman took a position on the Texas A&M clocktower, there was Howard Unruh, an insufferable bastard who took umbrage with even the most minor slights to his person and responded on the day of September 6, 1949 with explosive lethality.

To everyone outside the military who knew him, Unruh was an unremarkable dude. While in the military, he distinguished himself as a hell of a soldier who racked up an impressive (if you want to call it that) body count in the European Theater toward the end of World War 2. But upon returning home to Camden, New Jersey, everyone noted a change in his personality. They didn’t know what they were dealing with back then, but Unruh was most likely dealing with PTSD. What’s more, he was a closeted gay man in small-town America during a time when being openly gay was a death sentence. He had also turned his mother’s basement into a shooting range where he indulged his gun nut sensibilities and likely became the origin of the mom’s basement neckbeard weirdo.

Unruh kept a diary on the regular and recorded everything bad that happened to him and by whom it was done so that on the day of his infamous Walk of Death, he could pay them back in bullets. By the time the shooting was over, thirteen of his neighbors lay dead, several of them children, and three were injured.

Episode: 377

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