
Long allegedly killed his victims because he was tormented by the temptation they represented, so they say, even though he was a regular customer at those spas and paid the service charge to be tempted by his victims often. He describes himself as a sex addict, although he sounds like a regular twenty-one-year-old man afflicted only with the priapism that afflicts all men of his age, the vast majority of which relieve it by streaming porn rather than chilling Asian sex workers.
The ironic thing is, Jesus actually had advice for Long, for there is a verse from the Sermon on the Mount that says, “If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out.” This is one of Our Savior’s least frequently followed pieces of advice, but it’s there. Apparently the crowd at the Sermon was pretty thug life, so the Savior was trying to make a stern impression on them. Nowhere in the Bible, though, does it say, “If a Korean woman gives you wood, buy a handgun and chill her.” Although there’s plenty of advice on who to kill and when to kill them in the Old Testament, that piece of wisdom is not contained in its pages.
Of course, the counsel to yank out your own eyeballs is better suited for those porn-watchers. Long’s target would have to have been an even more personal one, but the words of the Bible are plain. It’s a rare, one might even say a non-existent, event for a good Christian man to shoot off his own pecker to avoid the temptation of plunging it into another prostitute. Capping your own dick is usually reserved for drunk guys exercising their Second Amendment rights. Long could have been a pioneer in this field, and been hailed for solving his issues in a fundamentally Christian manner.
Instead, he went on a killing spree against sex workers, which has been done so often it’s a cliché, at least here in the USA. He was excused by a local sheriff captain named Jay Baker as “being at the end of his rope,” and “having a bad day,” which resulted in Baker getting nearly as famous as Cooper all of a sudden.
We’ve all had bad days. Some of us are being audited by the IRS, some of us are getting our screenplay rejected once again, some of us are finding out our wives have been having sex with their bosses. Very few of us say to ourselves, when encountering a run of bad fortune, “The only thing that might possibly make this day shine for me is to kill every woman that’s ever yanked me off.”
Baker, meanwhile, has been fired from his job as spokesman for the Sheriff. Currently, he couldn’t get a job as a spokesman for a poultry farm.
So, there’s no happy ending for him, either.