I looked at it, and thought “that is Adam Lanza”. He wanted to be an assassin. He wanted to shoot people in their beds. He wanted to be thorough. Why did he shoot his mother four times? Quite obviously if the first shot was in her face, that was sufficient. I think he was living out a fantasy of being a professional, and professionals don’t leave anything to chance.
Why did he shoot the kids twice? Same reason: professional diligence. Why did he pick small kids? Because he was a coward, and he knew no one would fight him. He shot himself the moment a man with a gun showed up.
I don’t think he was crazy in any formal way. I think he developed a warped way of interacting with the world by doing too little of it. Think about this: he lived in a HUGE house, he was 20 years old, and he didn’t have a job, didn’t complete the last two years of high school (in my understanding), and played video games ALL THE TIME. He seemingly had no friends, and his mother more or less fostered a bunker mentality by believing that the end of the world was coming, or at least a general social collapse. That house must have felt something like the house occupied by the ghosts in the Nicole Kidman film “The Others”. He’s alone all the time, probably with an overprotective mother, spending hours and hours and hours in a hypnotic trance. Reality testing would blur for him. When he shot himself, he quite possibly may have been thinking he was rebooting a game.
I am very tired, so this may make no sense. I will offer once again the excuse that it has long been my belief that the more ideas you have and express, the more ideas you will be able to have and express, and the greater the variety, the greater the likelihood you’ll occasionally stumble like the blind squirrel upon a really interesting kernel of deep truth. Often I am exploring in the dark, and will admit as much.
Tomorrow should see a number of posts that I have in backlog.