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I can understand the suspicion about a set-up event, but my belief is that various gun rampages are 99% mental breakdowns and 1% ideology in most cases, and whatever ideology the perps might appear to espouse, that is not the primary factor in setting them off. With so much drug use thrown into the mix, we have to expect a steady background noise level of these events. Have you ever heard non-violent crazy people talking in a public place? People who are high on drugs but off their more useful meds? The monologue often makes reference to something “out there” but the level of integrated thought is very low.

Can give one recent example. Was on an escalator in a busy mall, a guy was just about level with me, looking back and talking in a very animated way about modelling jobs, Brittany Spears, and image. It seemed out of character but I assumed he had a female companion out of my immediate line of sight. But when I got off the escalator and he was still going on, I turned around and there’s a couple of blond teenagers way down the escalator, not even aware of him or his frantic utterances. Yet in his head, I’m sure he was convinced that they were “having a significant talk.”

Now if he suddently went violent some onlookers might say, “the guy was yelling about Brittany Spears” (sure I’ve spelled her name wrong but anyway) but of course he might just as easily have been blabbering on about Queen Elizabeth or dead whales. And he might have somehow acquired a T-shirt with a political message. Perhaps it even meant something to him one day, but during a psychotic break, it means nothing. This is what I imagine happened in this case. A lot of people are searching in this chaotic world, they find partial answers but they find other partial “answers” that turn out to be totally false leads. This seems to be happening more and more frequently on both sides of the political divide, and while the madness on the other side seems to have reached the top, we can’t be surprised if it creeps in near the bottom of our pile.