Shot In The Heart – Mikal Gilmore

The story of Gary Gilmore, the murderer who was executed by a Utah firing squad in 1977, as told by his brother Mikal. More specifically, as Mikal writes in the Prologue, this is “the story of the origins of Gary’s violence—the true history of my family and how its webwork of dark secrets and failed hopes helped create the legacy that, in part, became my brother’s impetus to murder.”
Mikal is describing what is known in religious circles as “generational sin”: habits, attitudes, addictions, destructive world views, dysfunctional interpersonal relationships, emotional and spiritual corruption (the list could go on for a very long time), that propagate from one generation to the next, in a repeating pattern that is incredibly hard to break and has disastrous consequences.
What Mikal is lamenting in this book, without him naming it, or apparently without even knowing how to name it, if the lack of Logosity; living a life consistent with the characteristics of the Logos.
Mikal’s book is a testament to how minimizing the sins of the spirit—lying, resentment, spite, petty rebellion—inevitably build to catastrophic sins of the soul and body, leading, in Gary’s case, to the ultimate physical sin: unprompted murder.

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