Right on Jack. The armchair psychologists and newspaper pundits can blame firearms, movies, drugs, and mental illness. None of which we will ever control. If the reason was for attention or notoriety however, there is simply no need to feed the thoughts of another beast.

Regardless of what this lunatic's motives were, if any, there are other deranged people out there who hopelessly crave attention. Nothing good can come out of showing those folks one last path to glory.

The media contributes to this social disease.

This blog is considered media, is it not?

Not really. Nor does it want to be.

Three cheers for him rotting in anonymity.

The media frenzy will only bring out more crazies who will want to top his success. But then, that is what sells soap and that is their purpose.

This reminds me of the terrorists who blow themselves up killing others, in the hope of a heaven filled with many virgins, milk and homey.
Their relatives get paid and pictures are hung up in their honor.
What is the difference between that and getting talked about for days on end by pseudo psychiatrists in the media?
Enough already!

Why could not the mutt just shoot himself rather than ruining 2 and maybe three families? And he could not get in the Marines because of injured foot?? What caused the injury, did it never heal? SO many excuses for this mutt.

Did anyone watch that ghastly video? This really is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Sludge, slime and primeval ooze. Hideous. There is nothing to be learned or understood here.

Ginny Burdick won't give it a rest.
"never let a tragedy go to waste"

I have been ruminating since learning yesterday that I knew this lady once upon a time, when she had a different name, and we used to chat and trade stories after the morning ritual of dropping off the kids at school (our children attended the same school from kindergarten to the 4th grade,) She was a nurse, but not working while raising her daughter in her early years. As I recall her, she was one of those kind people that we always remember later, populating the pastiche of our past lives. Sweet. Not effusive, not opinionated, slightly unsure of herself, as so many women are in the early years after the birth of children, but with an apparent and forthright steadiness, and a nice, shy smile. Not a beauty, but attractive; in more recent photos of her released by the press, she appears to have relaxed and blossomed into the fullness of maturity.

How to make sense of it. There is no sense to be made. These people might just as well have been killed by drunk drivers or by lightning or a flood. The madness of a youthful male for whom death, (his own, and that of others, having become entwined as an extension of his mental experience, an inexorable draw upon the psyche), is wholly and purely random.

This morning I wondered. People rail against gun availability, want to change laws, are sickened and outraged by the human involved, yet...I wonder if it is not possible that more lives would have been lost if this man had had his breakdown later in life. If it had occurred when he was older, with more resources and planning, his rampage could have been much more deadly. Remember the Egyptian airline pilot in his 40's who decided to commit suicide and take a whole planeload of people down with him into the sea? The other thing that occurs to me is the possibility, unreported by the press (at the behest of authorities hoping to avoid more copycat activity), of a counter-shooter in the mall who may have confused the mind of the lunatic, causing him to be unable to focus on his mission, and perhaps inducing him to take his own life earlier in the rampage. At any rate, it seems that there is a miracle buried in the core of this tragedy. The miracle is that only two such stalwart, loving members of the community got cut down in the prime of their lives, considering that their killer was armed the way he was.

But such musings are really a cover for hope; hope perhaps, that somehow these events unfold in people's hearts, and make them kinder, more giving people, as part of the process of remembrance, and part of a collective transcendence of wordly misery, once described by the great Victorian poet, Matthew Arnold, lamenting the loss of the Sea of Faith:

"But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world."

Thank you Gaye

Maybe I'm wearing my foil hat a little too tight, but it occurs to me that perhaps he wasn't really the shooter?

Perhaps there was someone else? Perhaps he was merely caught in the stairwell of the mall by this lunatic and setup to take the fall? Without having been there, I could see it happening.

Chase the kid into or find him in the stair well, force him to change clothes by gunpoint, then kill him with the rifle so that it looks like suicide.

Sure, it is highly farfetched, but with the media scarfing on every piece of "fact" and regurgitating only the emotional content of it to make ad sales, something like the above could easily be missed.

This is truly sad, the current state of the media. The shift of focus away from the importance of the story and the truth above all else towards one of getting known and on camera and helping make ad sales. Its sickening.

"highly farfetched" indeed, and sorry to say, the same conclusion independently reached by separate people simultaneously. Aurora, CO, theatre 'rampage' case makes a fat folder of reported complicity evidence.
But even in such conclusion it's still incomprehensible.

Meanwhile, the baton -- er, assault rifle -- has been passed to Connecticut for another celebration of Second Amendment rights.

At-least-a-dozen-dead-in-Newtown-school . My sister-in-law works at this school.

I suppose we could say I give a rat's butt