Chapter 9: Aiming a bit High

The chapter starts off talking about how Bob Hare is trying to broaden his PCL-R and teaching people how to use it by traveling from place to place around the country.  John Ronson then meets up with Bob at his hotel at Heathrow.  During their meet, Bob shares his travel experiences with Ronson and how he thinks that people can misuse the PCL-R checklist because there are many different ways to interpret the checklist in determining if someone is a psychopath or not.  Also, Bob shares that others can misuse the checklist because during his travel and teaching others how to use it, people kind of doze off and did their own think as he was teaching them how to interpret it.  After his meet with Bob, Ronson then meets up with Paul Britton, who is a man who seeks out ill-fated psychopaths and became famous from his ability to catch sexual psychopaths, at the Premier Inn.  Britton shares with Ronson an experience of how he caught a sexual psychopath who murdered a 23 year old woman, Rachel Nickell.  The person that he thought killed Nickell was wrongly concluded as a man named Colin Stagg.  It turned out that the man who was sketched looked a lot like an actual murderer named Robert Napper, but Stagg was considered the murder because he had fit Britton's profile.  After Napper had then been caught as the official killer of Nickell because of his many killings after Stagg was arrested, Britton's reputation was ruined because he had caught the wrong killer.

After reading chapter 8: The Madness of David Shayler and chapter 9: Aiming a bit High, I felt that the two chapters had really shown how crazy the world is and you never know what information is true or false and made up by crazy people in our society.  For chapter 8, it introduces a man named David Shayler, who is into the conspiracy theories of what actually happened when the north was on the tube in London the day the July 7th attacks. I liked this chapter because I am into conspiracy theories and learning about how others feel about a major event that cause a lot of trauma in others' lives.  For chapter 9, I like that Ronson had really shown that maybe people who are thought to be crazy on the Bob Hare checklist are maybe not crazy because there are other things that have triggered why the person acts a certain way.  Although the two chapters had shown me how crazy the world is, I feel that society expects that kind of crazy to fulfill our desires.  In saying this, it is like watching a scary or grotesque movie, although we say that things are scary or nasty, we are prone to those things and we expect those things from movies and want more of it.  So in some ways, I feel that there are a little bit of crazy in everyone to want those desires and to trigger our interests in things that are obviously judged my society and by us as something that is abnormally wrong.