Ed West Ed West

The California spree killer: why is that loser’s face all over the media?

Last Saturday a young man in southern California murdered six people. I’m not going to name him or link to his picture because you would have probably seen it anyway, and he does not deserve to be remembered except by his family. He achieved nothing.

One of the depressing inevitabilities of such atrocities is the eagerness with which people in the media jump to some sort of political explanation; since many of these killers are men hateful of women or other people generally, and are obsessed with guns, some commentators put this in a wider context of political conflict where scant evidence actually exists.

If we were to draw a counter, conservative political explanation we might as well blame modern sexual mores that create intense and frustrating sexual competition, or point out that such killers are more likely to come from broken homes, or play lots of computer games.

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