Can we forgive someone who hasn’t asked for forgiveness? There seems to be a lot of people who feel that we can’t assume any mercy for Ratzmann because of the enormity of his crime. Not only that, but some are implying that it would be wrong to suggest that mercy would be the right response. It would be the equivalent of sympathy for the devil.

Or would it?

Despite the havoc the 44-year-old Ratzmann wreaked on his congregation, [LCG member Thomas] Geiger said, church members heard a mostly upbeat message of forgiveness and hope.

“We hugged and cried over this, even Terry’s family,” said Geiger. “We’ve made our peace with them.”

Geiger, like some of the others in attendance, had family members killed or wounded in the rampage at the Brookfield Sheraton hotel.

Among them was Bart Oliver, Geiger’s nephew. After attending Ratzmann’s funeral and getting a quick bite for lunch, Geiger and his family moved on to the 15-year-old’s funeral, held at the Country Springs Hotel in Waukesha.

Glenn Diekmeier, who survived last weekend’s shootings and whose father, Harold, was killed, attended the Ratzmann funeral (“JS Online).

I’m strangely moved by the fact that victims’ families were in attendance at Ratzmann’s funeral. I doubt there were many, if any, families of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims at his funeral. I doubt very much that there would be victims’ families at the funeral of Atlanta gunman Brian Nichols had he killed himself. Thinking about the nature of these three different crimes clarifies for me why it’s possible to speak of mercy in Ratzmann’s case.

This was not an extended killing spree, as in the Dahmer case. Nor was it the act of a desperate man trying to escape from the police. This was an otherwise “normal” individual that inexplicably went berserk. Recall that when a member addressed Ratzmann by name and asked him, “Why are you doing this?” Ratzmann stopped. Whatever clicked in the first place clicked again, and I would imagine that in that moment he possibly realized what he had done and realized the simplest way out would be to take his own life.

Was it premeditated? It seems so —- he did buy the gun in the summer. Was it planned, as a terrorist attack is planned? I doubt it. He came to church with his Bible, and then returned home to exchange it for a gun.

It all revolves around whether Terry Ratzmann was a victim in this too, and I believe he was. It now appears unlikely that this would have happened if he’d sought professional psychiatric help; if he hadn’t been a member of a legalistic sect that prescribed whom he could date and actively forbade people from dating whomever they chose; if he’d had a better relationship with his father; if his parents hadn’t divorced; if the WCG hadn’t split apart -— all these have been bantered about as causes, which lumped together with whatever other demons that haunted him, pushed an instable man to a point of vicious violence.