We ask, “Why would a young man from a materially comfortable home walk into a school and murder 20 children?” The better question might be, “Why don’t more young men do it?”
More young men who don’t know what it means to be a man, and thus don’t know how to become one. More young men who have no religious or ethical beliefs that make honor and sacrifice attractive. More young men who have no real political power, in a political system in which only the obscenely wealthy have real political power, and thus no real control over their future.
What would give them a will to live, to look out for and protect the weak people around them? A million-dollar home? Another cool video game? The next mindless Hollywood blockbuster?
What?
While I don’t doubt there’s some truth here, the way the story panned out points to extreme, improperly-treated mental illness. The killer’s mother was making plans to place him in an institution since he could not live a normal life. She made the mistake of telling him. And made the mistake of teaching him how to shoot a gun and leaving those guns where he could find them.
He snapped. And he snapped because that’s what mentally ill people do. And she made the mistake of telling him she was going to institutionalize him because she herself was unbalanced from all accounts. What sane parent would tell an unstable kid in advance he was going to be locked up? Most kids would have run away; he chose something far worse.
This was drama begetting more drama, and the more I learn, the more I understand why the other brother got the hell away from the both of them.
Your points are well taken, but this case strikes me as emblematic of a lot of other cases in which mental disturbance doesn’t lead to such extreme violence, but still produces a lot of bewilderment and despair. There just doesn’t seem to have been anything in his life which would have acted as a brake on his extreme actions.