The Burning of Bethany Magee

I’m haunted by what happened to Bethany MaGee. Haunted by how, in the midst of something as ordinary as a subway journey, she found herself doused with gasoline and set ablaze. Haunted that she’s now in a burn unit fighting for her life. Haunted at the thought that, even if she survives, she’ll likely be scarred for life, not simply from the burns themselves, but from the emotional trauma. 

Haunted, and also deeply, bitterly outraged. I recently wrote about the murders of Iryna Zarutska and Logan Federico, young women, like Bethany, attacked by strangers in moments when they should have been safe and secure. Writing that article, I wanted to conclude by saying “never again,” and yet I couldn’t. Not because the message didn’t need saying, but because I knew, deep down, that “never again” was tempting fate.

And so it has come to pass. Yet another innocent young woman horrifically attacked. Yet again attacked by someone who should never have been out on the street to do the attacking, someone who’d been arrested over and over again, and yet spat back out by a system unwilling to confront the fact that some people simply cannot be allowed to share space with the rest of society. Yet another failure of our mental health care system, but above all, of our justice system. 

When I wrote of Iryna and Logan, I wrote, despairingly, of the need for young women to arm themselves along with all the other vulnerable members of society, the elderly, the disabled, and anyone else lacking the physical wherewithal of a Chuck Norris or a Jacky Chan. I evoked the message of Chicago’s favorite liberal columnist, Mike Royko, who, decades ago, in response to a similar horror, turned away from his anti-gun ideology and counseled young women to arm themselves. 

Frankly, both then and now, this represents the counsel of despair. Make no mistake — in the present moment I would very much prefer to see armed women to dead or dying ones. And I agree with the point made long ago by Royko, that having a woman blow away her attacker would have a salutary effect on the problem. It would eliminate one predator, and it might serve as a deterrent to others. It might also encourage progressive judges, the kinds who seem hell-bent on returning predators to the streets, to perhaps explore some other options, if only to protect their “pets,” the violent criminals who they few as unfortunate victims of the “system.”

But I entertain no illusions on this score. The necessary training and the constant situational awareness and the stress of cycling between self-defense guru Jeff Cooper’s “Condition Yellow” and “Condition Orange” represents a burden no honest citizen should be expected to maintain on a daily basis. In our current cultural climate, a successful act of self-defense would likely bring down the harpies of victimhood on the side of the dead attacker, not the woman who defended herself. Worst of all, for any normal person, taking a life, even as an act of self-defense, almost always carries a lifelong burden all its own.

Above all, the very idea that the only solution to this problem is the proliferation of defensive armament offends every notion of civilized society. Shared public spaces should be safe public spaces. Down through the years, I’ve relied frequently on public transport. Living in London and in Munich, I rode the subways every day, and never for a moment felt unsafe.

Still, I recall, rather ruefully, that I was mugged the first time I ever used public transportation, ironically, riding on the Chicago subway. I was a hick kid from a small-town in Georgia, and I was lucky enough to simply be robbed, threatened with but not subjected to physical harm — I had the good sense to surrender all the cash in my pockets, and was allowed to go on my way.

But that was 1970, a much more innocent time, and even the muggers seemed content not to escalate. The threads of the social compact have frayed enormously since then and in many places, notably our dysfunctional blue cities, have snapped altogether. The task before us, then, is enormous, requiring a comprehensive reassertion of some very basic values.

First, we have to recommit to incarceration of violent criminals, and, for the worst among them, the death penalty. I worked in the Florida state prison system for a year just after finishing my Ph.D. I didn’t want to, but just married and struggling to find a proper teaching job, I took the offered opportunity. I’m glad I did, because it quashed whatever illusions I might have entertained about the rehabilitative potential of most violent criminals. I often wish that our current crop of young leftists might be exposed to a similar experience.

Second, we have to forthrightly address the problem of mental illness and drug addiction — the two, quite clearly, often go together. Not all mental illness is violent, and that’s worth remembering. But too often, violence and mental illness go hand in hand, and a care regime that makes excuses for the violence in the name of providing treatment is absolutely unacceptable. 

Yes, the old institutions of confinement care were often hellholes, but that’s no excuse for simply dumping such people out on the street. For their good, and the good of everyone else, they need to be kept safe and off the streets. Doing it right will, no doubt, be expensive, but also undoubtedly less so than the damage they wreak when abandoned to the various pretenses of outpatient care — or no care at all.

Finally, the judges and prosecutors that are at the center of the problem should be held accountable, and so should the mayors and city councils that enable them — looking at you, Brandon Johnson. There is no excuse for allowing violent criminals and the violent mentally ill out on the street — no excuse whatsoever, not sympathy, not pious progressivism, not fantasies of rehabilitation. If voters are too much in thrall to the teacher’s unions and the big-city Democrat machines to elect more responsible leadership, then they, too, own a share of the blame.

Sadly, the world seems to be going in the opposite direction. I revisited London and Munich last year and in neither case did their public spaces seems as safe as they did when I lived there in the 1970s. Even the proverbially safe Scandinavian countries no longer seem capable of maintaining the security of public spaces. As our own Kevin Cohen observed in his article on the rape crisis in Sweden, the authorities remain in thrall to woke pieties, unwilling to confront a catastrophe that defies their comfortable assumptions about multiculturalism. Cohen closes with a question we should be asking ourselves: “Can a society remain open, coherent, and safe if it lacks the confidence to articulate the values it expects all within it to uphold?” 

We won’t solve any of this overnight, though we’d best not waste any more time. In the meantime, and on this Thanksgiving weekend, let’s at least pause to pray for Bethany’s recovery, for the strength she and her family will need going forward. Let’s pray for the families of Iryna and Logan, facing a first Thanksgiving — and soon Christmas — filled with heartache and a special loneliness.

And let’s pray for our country, that we may find our way to a society in which young women need not fear the very ordinary processes of life. They should be able to ride the subway or walk back to their cars after dark without constantly looking over their shoulders or wishing for a gun. We may never get there, but we should be ashamed of failing to try.

I’d finished this piece, and submitted it to the editors when word came that two members of the West Virginia National Guard had been shot in cold blood only blocks from the White House. Just minutes ago, the news came that one of them, 20 year-old Sarah Beckstrom, has died of her wounds. I’ll leave the analysis and the broader commentary to others, but now, I’m writing these words with tears in my eyes, tears of sadness, but also tears of rage. The circumstances may be different from Bethany, or Iryna, or Logan, but the thought of yet another precious young woman dead, murdered, just breaks my heart.

Pray for her and for her grieving family, pray as hard as you’ve been praying for Bethany and her family. Pray for young Andrew Wolfe, the other Guardsman, still fighting for his life. Pray for our country, and pray for the strength and the determination to see an end to this unending horror. There can be no more excuses–this has to stop.

READ MORE from James H. McGee:

Getting Ahead of Ourselves About the 2028 Elections

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Defending Nigeria’s Christians from Islamist Genocide

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional.