neither here nor there

I wrote this at a forum I frequent, on a thread dealing with the Virginia Tech shooting.

I find it ironic that the WBC is going to be protesting. I think that they believe that if everyone in the US believed as they believe, then bad things would stop happening -- that is, it's the stuff that other people are doing that's making them unhappy, disappointed, or angry, rather than having a degree of control over their feelings and doing something to make the world better.

I'm not sure about the shooter's (s'?) situation, but I can't imagine (though that might just be failure of the imagination) someone gunning down 33+ people not being angry or desperate about something. Rather than dealing with it or talking about it, he hurts other people. It's other peoples' fault that he's hurt of course, and not his own. If they changed, then he wouldn't think these things or feel these things, rather than take a degree of responsibility for his own feelings.

someone replied to me:
Wait so are you saying that it's not the shooters fault that he gunned down so many, but it's societies fault, or are you just explain a position that some people might take to this event?

So I responded
I keep forgetting, sarcasm doesn't read well over the internet.

I think that people who blame others for their actions and situations are most at fault. It'd be unreasonable to blame just one thing, idea, or influence on what happened, and no, I can't blame society for what one person did. Certainly there was a confluence of outside influences, but for me, it boils down to one point:

If he had taken responsibility for how he felt, rather than blaming other people, this tragedy probably wouldn't've happened.

You could say this about Columbine, or heck, you can say that about 9/11. What do the terrorists say to us, in essence? If you change to become like us, we'll stop attacking.

And that's bullshit.

You made me do this, one report has him writing?

Whoever that's directed at (on the off chance that this person is alive,) they didn't go and buy a couple of pistols. They didn't buy the ammo. They didn't make a plan, they didn't pull the trigger. Most likely, this person hurt him, maybe even humiliated him. And that happens to almost everyone. And since most people don't go and become school shooters, this too is bullshit.

I can imagine that he idolized his pain. His pain makes him special, his pain marks him, or something. Gah. I don't know if you can reach out to a person like that, so you can't say, oh, if someone did this for him or that for him... he had people "reaching out" to him all the time in little ways, and he rejected it. I don't know at what point some intervening person could've stopped this, but it could've been stopped, all the way up until the first shot was fired, by him.