0
0
Well, tough question that is. Are mass shooters just losers? Outcasts? Evil? Off their meds? Maybe taking mental health drugs that, when taken in incorrect doses cause, rather than treat mental dysfunction? I saw this piece at The Other McCain and just got around to reading it all at The Unherd. Take some time and go read it. Here is a sample.
Rampage shooters tend to be losers. The archetype of the modern school shooter, Eric Harris, frequently wrote in his diary about his feelings of alienation and resentment over his lack of social success. “I just want to be surrounded by the flesh of a woman,” begins an entry dated five months before the Columbine shooting, which later devolved into psychopathic fantasies of torture and mutilation. But in an entry from five days later, written after purchasing his first guns, Harris is exuberant. “I am fucking armed. I feel more confident, stronger, more God-like.”
Elliot Rodger, the 2014 Isla Vista shooter whose “manifesto” was a laundry list of complaints about his loneliness and sexual rejection, felt particularly resentful toward his female classmates, whom he saw as “mean, cruel, and heartless creatures that took pleasure from my suffering”. Unable to attract a girlfriend, he settled on revenge. “If I cannot rise above them,” he wrote, “I will destroy them.” When Rodger finally buys a handgun, he is happy for the first time since childhood. “I brought it back to my room and felt a new sense of power. I was now armed. Who’s the alpha male now, bitches?”
Go read it all. The human mind is an amazing thing, and, we may never fully understand it. No doubt mass shooters are deeply flawed. The best advice I could give is for people to stop blaming video games, or guns, or music and accept the fact that there are very dangerous people, whose minds are twisted and, for lack of a better word, evil. Once we accept that, we must also accept that disarming good people will never solve the problem of sick people who wish to do evil things. Our best hope is to be as prepared as possible, with as many good security measures as possible. Gun free zones are, often magnets rather than deterrents for mass killers. That is just reality. As long as politicians and the media prefer climbing up on the Soapbox of Gun Bans to hardening security at schools, and other targets then we ought to ignore them. They are not looking to solve problems that can lead to tragedies. Instead, they are looking to use the tragedies to curtail liberty.
Their having power, and accruing more power is, apparently more important than public safety
