Quiet, Kept to Himself Mostly

According to a CNN article, the man who opened fire at a women’s dance class in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania attended a dating self-help seminar, and was described by a female worker at the seminar to have been “quiet and studious.”

Some news accounts like to portray the shooter as someone who was starved for companionship, and that his motive for the rampage was a long history of failed relationships, which led to him feeling angry and resentful toward women. It makes more interesting news, I suppose, to assume that a man would resort to such violence merely out of the frustration of not having found a companion.

I think the answer is far more simple and less dramatic. Reading over the shooter’s blog, I found it quite revealing. I was less moved by his accounts of failed relationships or how women would not give him the time of day, and more intrigued by the apparent signs of sociopathic behavior. He talks about his job, the economy, his family, and many other things. His rage reaches its highest level on the topic of women; however, it is clear that his relationship difficulties were only one aspect of his miserable life.

He speaks of the prospect of people wanting to study his blog, yet there is very little, if any, research value to his tirades. He seems to want people to think that women rejecting him all his life was the sole motivation for his actions. Perhaps he thought he was dishing out punishment in the form of post-traumatic guilt. However, the way he describes the intended shooting as a “project” is very detached. Despite the fact that this whole “project” supposedly stems primarily from the fact that women do not want him, he continues to plot it even after he manages to get a date, simply setting his deranged plans to the side.

He may have had a hard time with women. But that’s not why he went on a rampage. He did so, because he was mentally ill. That may not be the fact he would want people to focus on, nor is it the image reinforced by the news media, but no psychologically healthy man plots a shooting rampage in a calculated and detached fashion just because women don’t want to date him.