Societal shock gripped the Washington, D.C. area in October of 2002. Over the course of twenty days, ten people were shot and killed by a seemingly invisible sniper who emerged to murder randomly. It was only late in the spree when police realized the trail of murder reached back further to February of the same year, and farther than Washington. The demographics of the victims were such it was difficult, if not impossible for law enforcement to pin down any motive or pattern— ages ranged from 13 to 72, race varied, and they lived across several different states (Washington, Alabama, Louisiana, Maryland, and Virginia). What made even less sense to authorities was the identity of the killer, or, as they came to discover, killers. The culprits of this murderous rampage were 41-year-old John Allen Muhammad and 17-year-old Lee Boyd Malvo. Generally, U.S. mass murderers and serial killers are homegrown white men. And here were two African-American males— the younger of the two living undocumented in the country— without an easily identifiable motive which only added to the chaos they created.
Blue Caprice (2013) is a biopic taut with anger. It’s a character study of both Muhammad (played by Isaiah Washington) and Malvo (played by Tequan Richmond) in the immediate lead-up to their killing spree. The film depicts Muhammad almost as a prototype of what we now know more formally, and laughably, as a Men’s Rights Activist (MRA), showing how misogynistic hatred for his wife evolved over time into a general hatred for everyone and everything around him. Malvo is portrayed as a lost young man adrift in a country that was not his home without his mother, who latched onto the only father figure available to him and eventually transformed into a murderous machine at the hands of that same man. 
Muhammad was seeking another person— be it a child or a significant other— to be subservient to him however he desired, whereas Malvo desperately wanted a parent who genuinely cared about him, and, tragically, they each to some degree found what they were looking for in the other. The way he trained Malvo is a deeper reflection on the way America continues to choose to raise each coming generation on its inherently toxic values.
After the opening credits, the film’s early scenes depict Malvo meeting Muhammad for the first time in Antigua. These moments play out like a normal drama. One scene shows Lee swimming out into the ocean as if he’ll swim forever. John has to go out to drag him back to shore before he drowns. This exemplifies Malvo’s loneliness, a strong visual of an anchorless childhood. He was often left alone by his mother when she would travel. When John met the boy in Antigua during 1999, he was there with his children. Muhammad was locked into a bitter custody battle with his ex-wife at the time and kidnapped his kids, fleeing the country using false documentation. The already troubled relationship with his children led him to seek out a surrogate child, whom he’d be more able to control. Malvo’s mother frequently abandoned him, so when he met Muhammad he was all alone. This made it easy for the older man to manipulate the boy, and Lee was already in the process of becoming isolated from the rest of the world.
The first step for John was to indoctrinate Lee into his worldview. Blue Caprice’s screenplay makes use of the time before the killing spree, only opting to show a couple scenes of violence nearing the end. In this time the viewer gets a sense of how Muhammad felt about the world, and how he moulded Malvo into that same perspective. That point of view was significantly shaped by misogyny, giving way to a general hate directed towards the world as a whole.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen countless shootings by American men who’ve all, without fail, had arrests for domestic violence, or who’ve had serious issues with women in some usually violent form. John’s ex-wife was the target of his rage, but he went on to see all women as the same. In one scene, he tells Lee his wife is a liar, following up quickly with: “They’re all liars.” After he’s being kicked out of a girlfriend’s house he becomes paranoid, asking her: “Who got to you?” He rambles on about people in the neighbourhood who testified on his ex’s behalf in regards to his domestic behaviour— here, his anger widens from the former wife to neighbours, labelling them all as “vampires” and the “real evil.” Finally, John descends into ultimate paranoia by simply referencing the infamous “they” without any indicator of who he’s actually referring to: “They took my gun. They took my kids.” His all-encompassing anger exceeds the feelings he has for his ex-wife and involves every slight he’s experienced over the course of a lifetime. A particularly chilling scene after this follows the surrogate dad and his son grocery shopping while John quietly lays out his plans, the culmination of his growing anger at the world, casually mentioning a random pattern of murders intended to create chaos.
This is the dangerous perspective in which young Lee was steeped. He was made to understand “Life is not fair”— an oft-repeated phrase by John— as a mantra. The man who became his surrogate father used this as leverage to make it seem like he was giving Malvo the world solely for having a roof over his head, even when the two were briefly living in a homeless shelter. Apart from the finale depicting moments of the pair’s rampage, the film’s most troubling scene is when John takes Lee out to the woods like they’re going for a nature run, but the father has other plans. He ties the young man to a tree, while Lee pleads with him, all the while telling him he isn’t mad. It’s easy to tell John’s doing this and convincing himself he’s putting the kid through a test, which is what the real Muhammad did to his accomplice-in-training. 
The following scene shows Lee making it home, and waiting for him is a meal: water and crackers with honey— a training diet the 17-year-old was actually fed for a time. This test in the wilderness was one of John’s methods for making sure his new son understood exactly how unfair he believed life to be, and it was a way to dehumanize Lee to a point where the kid would feel comfortable erasing the humanity of others, same as a soldier.
Just as quickly as John brought Lee into his warped worldview, so did he introduce the boy to firearms not long after they arrived in America. The film depicts the two out in the woods with a friend of John’s named Ray (played by Tim Blake Nelson)— a fictional stand-in for a close friend of Muhammad— firing off assault rifles at targets. In real life, Muhammad and Malvo just took turns firing at a tree stump for target practice in the friend’s yard. The screenplay focuses on this use of guns, showing a couple scenes of both Malvo and Muhammad firing guns, their faces plastered with blank stares. Lee’s defence would later argue violent video games helped desensitise him to actual gun violence. Whether we believe violent media plays a role in shaping young attitudes towards violence is not the point, because, as studies show— such as “The Influence of Media Violence on Youth” by Craig A. Anderson, Leonard Berkowitz, Edward Donnerstein, L. Rowell Huesmann, James D. Johnson, Daniel Linz, Neil M. Malamuth, and Ellen Wartella— certain types of people are, indeed, susceptible to the influence of violent media. 
One scene features Lee, alongside Ray, playing the popular game Doom. He asks how it feels to actually shoot someone, to which Ray replies he doesn’t know. The screenplay shows us a clear parallel in Malvo’s psychology drawn between the target practice with a real gun, using inanimate objects, and the fake gun with the computerised targets in Doom. This doesn’t suggest regular kids playing video games will become desensitised. Malvo was raised by Muhammad the way child soldiers are trained by warlords. His question to Ray shows a disconnect that illustrates an inability to comprehend the difference between real life and video game violence. This scene also foreshadows Malvo’s eventual first kill and the shock the viewer sees on his face in the aftermath when he discovers in real time the difference between Doom and committing an actual murder.
The greatest part of Blue Caprice is its focus on raising the next generation, juxtaposing John’s parenthood on an individual level with a societal one. This aspect emerges from the screenplay in the way John treats Lee as less an informally adopted son, more of a soldier in training. The typical father-son relationship is subverted gradually. John questions the kid “Do you love me?” one moment and then the next he’s taking Lee into the forest, leaving him tied to a tree. The grocery shopping scene, visually, is one that would appear in another drama between a parent and child, warped into a sinister discussion of mass murder. John submerges Lee entirely in every aspect of his worldview in the same way an overbearing parent thrusts their beliefs onto their child rather than letting them figure out their own. His perspectives of misogyny, guns, and violence turn the lost boy into what he himself jokingly calls “a monster.”
Now look at Muhammad’s tutelage as that of America. Nearly every week there’s another man with an assault rifle storming a public area and laying waste to unsuspecting victims, and nearly every time a personal history of violence against women comes out after the fact. 
The United States are raising their boys to have more autonomy than women, as well as instilling them with the idea that the Second Amendment— written in 1791, long before indoor plumbing, when the steamboat hadn’t yet quite been perfected, and a handful of years before there was a vaccine for smallpox— is a God-given right, not an afterthought to the Constitution. Donald Trump, as POTUS, is playing his role as a John Muhammad to the nation’s Lee Malvos every second or third tweet. Mass shootings will always be horrifying and tragic. In America, they’ve also become expected, in large part due to the swirling array of toxic cultures, from how women are treated to the way guns are a countrywide fetish. Men liked Muhammad are filling their sons’ heads with these damaging ideas every day. So the scariest part ultimately isn’t the proliferation of shootings across the U.S., it’s actually that there’s the potential for so many more to happen, and literally nothing is being done to stop it.
