Oh and I still keep hearing (heard Neal Boortz talking about it on his radio program) about the shooter lining up students against a wall and shooting. Has anybody confirmed that actually happened?
I just heard a student talk about the shooter going in a room and just randomly firing.....so just wondering if this lining up against a wall and just shooting one after another actually happened.
I remain unsure. It may be the case that he was simply a very disturbed individual.
Within a 'normal' context it would be easy to paint any 'hit man', effective assassin, or person inclined toward 'wet work' as a troubled psychotic, simply because 'normal' life operates under an entirely different paradigm. It may be that disturbed individuals are attracted to such professions as well. Psych screening is intended to eliminate such folks from many critical roles in our military, especially with WMDs.
Anyone who could seriously plot to slaughter dozens of noncombatant individuals outside of the context of unlimited warfare, regardless of the reason, is already a couple of standard deviations from the mean. There, even, the cold calculus of destroying a nation's ability to fight by wreaking havoc among its civillian population is one which we find generally unpalatable, but have utilized in the past, as has any nation still extant after several hunderd years.
Keep in mind that virtually anyone can be painted in the press as a 'disturbed individual' at some point in their lives. (Look what the press and law enforcement did to Richard Jewell, who was in reality a hero and whose actions may have saved numerous lives in the Olympic Park Bombing in Atlanta. He was villified, accused, and the usual 'loner, kept to himself, etc.', trotted out as the only 'real' damning evidence against him.)
Ever keep to yourself--either working too much or not feeling particularly social? Have a period of grief over a loss of someone or some thing ( a job, for instance)? Have a falling out with someone and comment later "That S.O./B., I'll kill him/her!"?
I have been exploring possibilities in other posts on this thread.
Maybe the dots I have tennatively connected are unrelated, and in one case (not a Chinese National), nonexistant. Such is the nature of trying to figure out what is going on before all the stories are aligned.
I am, however willing to look for those connections--just in case they do exist. Had more people done so, 9/11 might have been prevented.
Maybe it is telling that I have trouble with truly 'senseless' slaughter. For me, logic and rationality demand a deeper cause lurking behind the mayhem and carnage.
Maybe it exists, perhaps not.
At any rate, the professor bought his students time to get out the window, at the cost of his life. "Greater love hath no man...", and he is truly a hero in every sense of the word. May the Almighty bless him with eternity in paradise for that selfless act.
It may be coincidental that his research happened to encompass the topics it did.
For the victims and their realtives and friends, I can only offer my prayers that God will console them in their grief.
For my country, I hope and pray it is not rushed into more of the nonsensical prohibitive regulation which helps make populations larger than most towns I have lived in completely defenseless against such events.
As for the ahooter, I pray for his parents. What horror.
God, who knows so much more than I, will deal with the perpetrator as He sees fit.