woke up still wondering how you could
have it in your soul to shoot up a school
this world disgusts me more and more every day
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Almost-daily massacres make precocious poets. This verse (well, a tweet turned into verse by UD) is by a high school friend of one of the injured students at the University of North Carolina Charlotte.
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Putting together the information that’s emerging, it starts to look like this (though again I’m guessing): The guy was a student at the school as recently as this semester, but he withdrew. If a mental health episode prompted the withdrawal, his attack on a classroom full of students (randomly chosen, one assumes) fits the classic angry white male American workplace/school massacre model. Resentment and paranoia engulfed him; if he could no longer be a functional human being/student, he would destroy people who could be.
All of this would make the attack a variant of the Elliot Rodger massacre. In 2014, Rodger, the same age as the latest shooter (22), killed six people near UC Santa Barbara.
Just before driving to [a] sorority house, Rodger uploaded to YouTube a video titled “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution”, in which he outlined details of his upcoming attack and his motives. He explained that he wanted to punish women for rejecting him and that he envied sexually active men and wanted to punish them for being sexually active.
Maybe today’s maniac has made this be about sexual envy; maybe it’s just about, as I said, homicidal envy of other peoples’ ability to be functional human beings.