“How harshly is it even possible to treat someone? Especially when they’re already dead. That’s not the point. The point is the clear difference in the nature of these acts. The three “shooters” were acting out personal fantasies of some kind, and in this sense their acts were “crazy”, that is done only to gratify the impulse, and with no idea of anything to follow.”
James Holmes and Jared Lee Loughner are very much alive.
And neither of the above mentioned shooters or the Columbine killers or Adam Lanza acted on impulse. Each of their attacks were methodically planned and we have no idea what they would have done if they had walked away and had to be hunted down.
Obviously Holmes and Lanza planned their attacks. Maybe I should have said that they were done to gratify their “obsession”, but they clearly had no plans beyond the final act. Holmes had his whole apartment rigged to blow. Contrast this with the Tsarnaevs, who returned to their apartment and resumed their “normal lives”. They took great pains to conceal their own involvement, and I think this is very different than the shootings, where the act is a moment of personal exaltation, like Cagney on top of the gas tank.