James Kimmel, Jr.: Your Brain on Revenge

**Lee C. Camp** (0:02)
I'm Lee C. Camp, this is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.

**James Kimmel Jr.** (0:09)
So I was raised on a farm in Central Pennsylvania, and I was subjected to a lot of bullying there. This was by a group of guys who lived on neighboring farms to ours.
And that bullying culminated one night with them coming to our house, and staging an attack that ended up waking us up in the middle of the night to the sound of a gunshot.

**Lee C. Camp** (0:31)
Our protagonist here is named James. James was about 17 years old at the time.

**James Kimmel Jr.** (0:36)
When I looked outside in the morning and went out to feed our animals, I found our dog, a hunting dog named Paula, dead in her pen with a bullet hole in her head and a pool of blood. So it was a pretty shocking moment in my life.

**Lee C. Camp** (0:50)
Though James' parents contacted the state police, they decided not to take the matter any further.
James' father was an insurance agent who worked closely with other farmers in the community. He did not want to jeopardize his business over a few local kids who had taken an argument a step too far.

**James Kimmel Jr.** (1:08)
Two or three weeks later, I was home late at night by myself. It was dark, my parents were out somewhere, my brother was as well. There was a vehicle that came to a stop I could hear outside of our house, which was rare. We lived on a one lane country road. When I got up to look outside to see what was going on, it was the same truck that had taken off a couple of weeks earlier after the gunshot in the middle of the night. A truck that I knew was driven by one of the guys who had been tormenting and bullying me for years. Then there was a flash and an explosion, and they blew up our mailbox, so that pickup truck took off again.
With that explosion of the mailbox, the limits on my self-control detonated as well, and I wasn't able to hold that in anymore.

**Lee C. Camp** (1:55)
James decided to take matters into his own hands.

**James Kimmel Jr.** (1:58)
I'd been shooting guns since I was probably eight years old on the farm, and my dad kept a loaded revolver in a nightstand, and I ran and I grabbed that gun, and I went off after those guys through the dark of the night just shouting and screaming in rage.
I eventually cornered them on one of their farms up against a barn, so the scene there was their pickup truck nose first into a barn wall, and my car behind theirs with my brake beams on. What I could see at that time were three or four heads in the back window of the truck. They slowly got out and turned around and they're squinting through my high beams to see who had just come flying down their one lane country road. What was clear to me is that they were unarmed. They didn't have any weapons in their hands, at least. And they couldn't have known that I had a gun. So I really had the element of surprise. It was kind of the perfect setup for some serious, serious payback.

**Lee C. Camp** (3:03)
James grabbed the gun from the passenger seat, opened the driver's side door, and began to get out of the car.

**James Kimmel Jr.** (3:10)
But then, I had this sort of flash of insider inspiration that kind of shot me into my future.
I could see a couple of things. One was clear is that if I went through with this, I'd have to live with a whole new identity as a killer, which is definitely not something I ever considered in my life. And the other thing that was clear to me is that I might not survive this event at all.
Maybe they did have weapons in their truck. Probably their parents who were asleep in the farmhouse nearby did have guns. Maybe they'd come out. Maybe there'd be a shootout with police. I could surely be arrested and maybe incarcerated, and I wouldn't be here with you today. So there were two fast considerations. All that happened in like the blink of an eye. But it was enough to cause me to stop and pause and then pull my leg back in the car, close the door, put the gun back on the seat, and back the car back down that lane and go home that night. So it come within seconds of committing what would be defined, at least at the time, as a mass shooting.