Oregon shooting: The root cause

The step-sister of Oregon’s mass-murderer said the shooting didn’t make sense. “All he ever did was put everyone before himself, he wanted everyone to be happy,” she told KCBS-TV. This is key to understanding the crime’s root cause, suggests Dr Michael Hurd:

“All he ever did was put everyone before himself, he wanted everyone to be happy,” she told KCBS-TV.
    [The murderer]’s step-sister (like most people) thinks self-sacrifice is a virtue. But when you have no rational concern for your own interests, you don’t have much of a life, you possess no self-esteem, and you have nothing much to live for; mix those qualities with a tendency and fascination for violence, and you’ve got a recipe for tragedy...
    ...Another of [the murderer]'s blog articles reportedly lamented materialism as preventing spiritual development. He probably did not like capitalism, since he condemned materialism. People who detest capitalism tend to detest America most of all. They see millions of others having a reasonably good time in a cultural and economic environment they consider rotten to the core. In some, the festering hatred turns to violence, but the hatred towards America (by Americans, especially younger ones) is probably more widespread than most of us realise.
    Anti-materialism, anti-capitalism. Anti-individualism. These are the dominant themes of many public schools and certainly most of academia, with regard to philosophy, culture, social/behavioural science and the humanities. Could these ideas be toxic and unhealthy? Not as an excuse for violence, but as an explanation for mental unhealthiness which only varies in degree from one young person to another, unless they reject those ideas?
    ...Again and again, these shooters are young men who seek out educational settings. It’s almost as if they’re trying to tell us something, in a dark and twisted way: “The ideas you’re teaching us are wrong, toxic, silly and unfounded. See what you’ve created?”

Read the whole article: Whatever Happened to the Search for “Root Causes” of Crime?, Dr Michael Hurd.

RELATED POST: The Arrogant Ignorance of Supporting Gun Control, Dr Michael Hurd (2013):

The arguments for gun control or gun confiscation basically boil down to this: “If guns were illegal, they would not be available. If they weren’t available, people like that crazy killer in [fill-in-the-blank-with-location-of-latest-shooting-here] would not be able to use them.”
    This assumes that a crazy psychopathic killer, hell-bent on murder, would let an obstacle like finding a gun legally stop him. This is absurd…
    The people who claim that violence can be controlled by outlawing guns show how little they understand about the nature of criminals and criminal psychology.
    I suppose this is why the self-same people who favour gun confiscation are the very same ones who plead for all manner of excuses for criminal behaviour. They tend to be the same type of people who feel that everything and everyone is responsible for criminal behaviour, other than the criminal himself.
They can’t understand, or perhaps don’t want to understand or come to grips with, the psychology of evil. It’s admittedly disturbing to try and do so. But this is no excuse for eliminating the right of the nonviolent, noncriminal majority to protect themselves from violence by making it harder or impossible for them to purchase weapons for self-defence.