Reply To: Aurora
there are reasons people do these things and to dismiss them as psycho/whack job
From a standpoint of public policy discussions, I’m going to assume this guy is insane until it’s demonstrated to the contrary. The age is about right for schizophrenia, though we (the general public) don’t have enough information about the guy to reach any firm conclusions. Lots of people who do this sort of thing end up dead in short order, which makes it harder to evaluate their mental state, unless they have a well-documented clinical history. One of the reasons I tend to lean toward schizophrenia as a diagnosis in such cases is that the onset is typically early adulthood; people tend to be cast out of the nest at around that age, and social isolation is near its lifetime maximum. It’s easy for someone to fall through the cracks at that age and not get the right sort of help.
With respect to “this sort of thing” I’m thinking especially of attacks on more or less public crowds made up of members of the general population: college undergrads (VA Tech), theater patrons (Aurora), and bus passengers (a bus fire in Madison in 1998 that I remember well because I knew one of the victims). Some shootings of politicians and other celebrities (shootings of Garfield, Reagan, Lennon, Giffords) fall into the same category, especially when others in the crowd are shot. These attacks are described as random and senseless precisely because there’s absolutely no discernible motive.
I tend to lump grade school and workplace shootings into a different category; those are circumstances where people can understandably feel trapped, and the shootings are more often closely targeted and less indiscriminate. Bullying is a serious issue in grade school; the closest thing in college is hazing, and its victims are people trying to get into prestigious social groups (fraternities, marching bands, etc.) rather than the socially isolated loners who seem to carry out these sorts of shootings. I can more easily see where grade school and workplace shootings are cases of people with catastrophically bad coping mechanisms, which is quite distinct from completely losing touch with reality.