Man, you guys are weird if you see this and your reaction is to feel sympathy or whatever for the murderer rather than disgust.
After following the story for a bit, I get the sense that this kid was mentally unstable already, and the trials and tribulations of modern life were just too much for him to handle. I feel like there are borderline cases of mental instability -- it sort of reminds me of Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter. Maybe this kid had Aspberger's Syndrome as well -- these are children with some mental or developmental problems, but display high intellectual function. They're socially awkward, but otherwise very smart.
To me, it feels tragic that someone is smart enough to know that they're not completely "right" -- but it's a rare person who can resist projecting those problems onto the rest of the world -- that's far easier than realizing the problem comes from you. Hence, all this 'the world is broken' rhetoric. If I were crazy, I would pray that I was so crazy I didn't realize I was crazy.
Before I had a child of my own I never bought into the culture war stuff (violent video games create violent children, Madonna is nude again?!) but now... now I sort of see why it's important. Our culture is a shared resource, and all of our children have to swim in that shared resource, so we should be careful about what we dump into that soup. Today's youth culture is highly, highly sexualized, and massively superficial. To me, that's like dumping sharks and turds into the culture "soup" -- my daughter is going to have to swim in that someday, so... please stop putting those things in the soup?
I think this kid's pre-existing mental problems plus our culture led to the violence. Everything this kid ever saw on television pounded home one message over and over -- virgins are lame, sex is everything.
Maybe his mania would have found some other violent focus -- who can say? But even so, there should be empathy for everyone in this sort of case. We should also reconsider our cultural choices. I keep hoping technology will one day allow all of us to construct a media experience that represents our own
designed cultures. My daughter will grow up Amish.
EDIT: I don't think Aspberger's equals Violent-Prone. But I do feel like since they're on the higher scale of the autism spectrum, they're aware enough (smart enough?) to know that there's this whole social level of interaction that nature just did not prepare them for. That must hurt in ways I can barely imagine. It must be like... the whole world can perform magic, and you can't. And I don't think you should fault someone for something beyond their control. If you have a tumor pressing against the part of your brain that controls aggression and impulse control, you're not really in control of your faculties. And that's tragic and worthy of empathy.
