“It doesn’t matter that most people are basically good. What matters is that we have more than enough bad folks to wreak havoc with all their good intentions.” Henry Bouchard, a semi-villain in my book, Live Free or Die, says this and tells anyone who will listen that “the bad guys are winning.”

His argument is hard to discredit. If the evil people in this country compromise only 1/10th of one percent of the population, we have over a quarter of a million people who are amoral, truly evil people who have no compunction about perpetrating evil acts against other human beings.

On a world stage, we have Paris and Kenya; on a city stage, we have Baltimore, a city that recently passed the 300 mark in number of homicides in 2015, including 45 in July alone; on a smaller city stage, we have Manchester, New Hampshire, where violent crime increased 24% between 2012 and 2013; on the small stage of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, we have the murder of Stacey Burns, a beloved elementary school nurse, a crime committed over six years ago and still is unsolved.

In Wolfeboro, a killer has, thus far, gotten away with a vicious crime, one so heinous that we would have to place this person in the “evil” category. Multiply this by the atrocities inflicted upon innocent people the world over, and one may begin to think that Henry Bouchard may have a point. What do you think? Are the bad guys winning?

With desperate sadness for all victims of evil in this world . . .

Duke