I find it amusing, in an ironic and sad kind of way, when people try and figure out why an insane person did something. It’s insanity! Shooting a whole bunch of school children is the act of an insane person. You can come up with all the reasons you want, but the simple fact is the act wasn’t rational, it wasn’t sane.
For all we know, he thought the space aliens were invading and he was doing his duty to protect us. Who knows? Who cares? It was something a rational, sane person would do.
Blowing up a building in Oklahoma city with a rented truck full of fertilizer, not something someone does by accident, is the act of an insane person. Whatever his reasons, they’re not the reasons of a rational being.
What sane people do
Rational, sane beings can sit down and talk with one another. Sane people understand there are lots of options. Talk. Move. Run. Hide. Eat. Bribe. Protest. Picket. Whatever. There are many, many options to work out one’s problems.
If the home life of the kid who shot the children was so bad, he could have run off and joined the circus, or hitchhiked to another state, or some such thing. Instead, he chose to deliberately shoot children in a school.
The search for reasons
And now the newspapers are trying to come up with a reason, some rational cause. He didn’t like his mother, his mother was going to put him in an asylum, he didn’t like the favor of his cookies, whatever. None of those are the reason he did what he did. He was insane. He wasn’t a rational being. It’s that simple. Stop trying to form a reason. That makes it somehow “okay”. He had a reason, after all, for doing what he did, however weird that seems. Nope. He wasn’t sane. Period.
Our legal system spends countless hours and millions, or even billions, of dollars to prove whether someone who committed murder was sane or insane. He murdered another human being (assuming this isn’t an accident or self-defense). Pre-mediated murder isn’t the act of a sane being. Stop trying to find an excuse or a reason. Just stop it.
There’s no excuse. There’s no reason. There’s no rationality to the act.
Blowing up a building in Iraq with a car bomb isn’t sane. Blowing up a building in Oklahoma isn’t rational. Shooting school kids isn’t rational. Putting on a vest with explosives and walking into a crowded mall isn’t something a sane person does.