The magazine's cover screams "Monsters" - but I'm not sure that's right. Their faces - the alleged DC Snipers - are smiling beneath the word; a posed snapshot cropped again and again to make it look different as it's shown again and again. They look happy in the photo - happy with life, happy to be with each other.

I'm in photos like that.

My kids have drawn monsters before - informed by Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and the like, they draw fantastic beasts, resplendent in claw, fang, and hoof. Terrifying beasts - if it weren't for the cartoonish knight keeping them at bay. "With Excalibur!", I'm solemnly informed.

The (alleged) snipers may look more ragged in recent pictures - but they have stubbornly refused to grow horns.

We've tried to give them some - to find some way they stand out, some way to identify the threat. Their race, their religion, national status, family life, military training - all these have already been suggested.

They're awfully broad.

Again, I think of this much-printed photograph - and all the similar ones that I'm in. More than one of those "identifying characteristics" apply to me. Many of them apply to a majority of Americans.

There have been times in all of our lives - all of us, no matter how we deny it - where we've been tempted to do something horrible. Maybe it was a once-in-a-lifetime flash, quickly squashed. Maybe it was a fantasy you dreamt in a fit of anger, never really let go of.

In all those cases, there was nothing really holding you back.

Nothing physical, nothing to prevent you save a tiny wall of will, the tiny chime of your conscience, a fear of some possible consequence. When you think about it, there's hardly anything stopping us at all. Just one little change...

A fictional character states he cannot hate what he doesn't know, and I understand him.

The venomous fear that blanketed the area has festered into hatred. Exceptions to death penalty moratoriums will be made for these two. They're different from us. They're not like us, these inhuman beasts, these monsters.

Can't you see their horns?