Christmas Insanity

Christmas is a time of year when there should be peace on earth and goodwill to all men. Instead the crazy people come out in droves and start killing, maiming and injuring eachother and the innocents around them. Three stories on the news caught my attention this week:
The first was a story about a woman in Missouri, who brutally strangled a pregnant woman, then cut the baby from her womb and absconded with it. The police caught her, and returned the baby, who is doing well (as far as I know from the news), to her father.
The second story was about a group of men who attempted to steal a car from a father, when the man tried to stop them driving off with his car and his baby, they threw the child from the window of the moving vehicle.
The third was about a psychiatric ward in France, where two murders took place, two nurses on the night shift were found dead, one had been beheaded and her head left on top of the television, the second had had her throat cut. Apparently the French government is now going to review security in it's psychiatric wards...Well woo hoo for them, it's a bit late now don't you think?
Anyway, the stories got me thinking about all the craziness and shit there is in the world, and how we view different crimes as either merely bad, or horrific. Would the strangling of the american woman have even made news over here if she hadn't had her unborn baby stolen from her body, would the crime have been so horrific if she had not been pregnant? If the men who stole the car had just stolen the car and not thrown the baby from the window would it have made news? I think not. The thing is, all crime affects the victims, just because a crime is not horrific or sensationalist enough to make the headlines doesn't mean that it is irrelevant or petty. Somebody has suffered because of it.
And as well as that, it seems that the christmas season brings out the crazy people, and the weirdos, and the sickos, and the ultra violent. Or maybe it's just that we notice it more because it's christmas and inside of us we're all dreaming of peace and goodwill, and every bad thing that happens, every violent act, every maiming and death that we hear about on the news makes that dream seem a little further away.