Stolen Lives

Part of the pathology that nearly all the "shooters" of our increasingly regular school massacres seem to share is the desire to transform themselves from insignificant nobodies into postmortem media stars. Their feelings of powerlessness cause them to imbibe deeply of our culture's gunslinger mythology and to embrace the romanticized view of "going out in a blaze of glory." 

Ideally, more accessible and proactive mental health services could help convince these individuals not to kill themselves at all. Failing that, one does wish we could convince them to make their suicides solo acts. The fact that the innocents pictured here (and others) died violently at the hands of a sick young man with a gun nut mother is an atrocity that makes me physically ill.