It's pretty disingenuous to a assume that because someone knows how to use a Glock, they must have served in a foreign military.

Citizen, non-citizen, American, Korean - the guy was psychotic. It has happened before, it will happen again, and racial and cultural background does not alter a disturbed mind. A Korean kid who is pressued too hard to excell in studies MAY become unbalanced, even commit suicide.

But it takes a special kind of crazy to brutally kill dozens of other people.

The more I think about it, the less I feel that we can actually prevent things like this.

I personally know someone who (a friend's brother), at age 12, emptied several rounds into a sleeping homeless man and killed him. I knew that the kid would be in jail by age 15. Anyone who spent more than 10 minutes near him could see that he was a sociopath. He hurt animals. He hurt people. He found incredible joy in causing pain. I knew this, but as a 15 year old girl, my warnings fell on deaf ears.

When the shooting occurred, lots of people claimed that they had no idea this could happen, and he seemed like such a nice boy. Either these people were delusional, or he had never killed THEIR cats with his bare hands, or he was incredibly charming when he had to be - or maybe a combo of those factors.

In any case, a lot of people blamed the parents for having firearms, and I can attest that the shooting WOULD NOT have happened if there were no guns in the house. BUT, he would have eventually killed someone. Maybe in a Cho-style massacre. Maybe he would have been a serial killer.

The problem is that the signs are there, and you can't do a damn thing about them. Lots of people tried to intervene on Cho's behalf, but no one knew that the threat could be so horrible - at worst, they figured, he might kill himself. His parents even called the university with this fear.

My point is that there are two factors in most shooting deaths - the availability of fire arms and the mentality of the killer. I believe in gun control, I really do. But in this case, it would have made no difference. In the case of the 12-year old killer, it would have made no difference. The only thing that could have stopped these killings is locking the psychos up and throwing away the key.

And that's just somewhere that we can't go, as a society.

I'm so glad that other readers are hesitant to immediately start blaming the administration. This is tragic, horribly tragic, and I have trouble believing that anyone at the university would have willfully left students in the dark. As others have said, this shooting doesn't really follow the typical pattern.

Don't assume that atheists can't make judgements about the scientific basis for religious experiences. First, OF COURSE atheists are going to be the ones studying the science behind faith, because they're the only ones who don't necessarily think of faith as a virtue. A religious person who regularly has and values religious experiences isn't going to look for a rational explanation.

Also, don't assume that all atheists have never had a religious experience. I have had many, but I've come to believe that they all had explanations that were rooted in chemical imbalances in my brain. The mind is a powerful thing, and we don't understand enough about it yet to think that we will never know it to be the cause of visions, dreams, voices, and near-death experiences.

Does this mean that we can blame the female soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan for the current problems there? Because it'd be nice if it didn't have to do with having started an elective war under false pretenses.

Oh, and if I hear one more man do the whole "father's rights" thing as a reason to deny women full and equal rights under the law then... Oh. Look. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH.

It's so sad to see global warming/climate change critics who don't understand what the entire idea is about. Weather and temperatures becoming MORE EXTREME. Not necessarily warmer. And since Inhofe can't understand any of it, all he can do is try to stop Gore from talking by screaming about his time.

I'd be enraged if I didn't find Inhofe so pathetic.

Joan, was Buchanan conceding a point or just trying to get you to shut up? Because "you've made your point" is what people say to me when they want me to shut up, not when they are conceding that I've offered something valuable to the debate.

Nigel's comment about the last girl:

"All the other girls managed to have some sort of spark even in this sort of morbid situation. I think I look at you in this picture, and you actually just look dead. One of the simplest things, like acting dead, can be the most challenging. The problem is that you didn't do anything. You just gave up and thought that that was being dead."

Hm. She's being criticized for ACTUALLY LOOKING DEAD in this sick charade?

I read this hoping for something a little more damning than "most liberal". I know the l-word is bad among conservatives, but still. I was really hoping that there was some foot-chewing going on.

The picture chosen for this story scares me - am I alone in thinking that Gonzales looks EXACTLY like our President, if our President were to gain 30 pounds and put on a wig? Look at the expression there! He's Bush's Latino doppelganger, and it scares the hell out of me.