/lit/ - Literature

As I fixed up and enjoyed my breakfast this morning I watched a branch of the mainstream media cover the Kentucky shooter (big mistake). At one point the "law enforcement correspondent," a hideous late middle-aged mulatto, was brought on to provide an assessment of the shooter's character and motives: "He was a coward. There's nothing else to say."

This isn't surprising; along with the one that goes, "He was evil. There's nothing else to say," it's the same standard mainstream media-approved line that I've heard over and over again every time there's a shooting of this sort. I understand these sentiments as a lament of least resistance in a time of anguish and a position where the killer's actions seem incomprehensible ("Why? They were such good people, they had families and children," etc), or perhaps more appropriately as a capitalization on real sentiments in order to push a political agenda, but it is also true that this attitude will never take us any closer to an understanding of the very real motives behind those actions. As an aside, it must take a tremendous amount of resolve (or else complete and utter apathy) to take on such a final undertaking, and so the charge of cowardice seems unintentionally comical (what was he scared of?) and only from a place of purely emotional grief or rage, but that is neither here nor there.

The killer was not born some Satan, with an understanding of the task at hand and a philosophy of waiting for the right moment to strike. As the history of mass shooters might make clear, he was a person that probably could have been born into any number of other human societies and managed NOT to attempt to murder people.

So what led to this unhappy conclusion? Are there any sociological (or maybe psychological) books that can shed light on the subject? It seems to me that they might be forthcoming from my cursory understanding of topics like Durkheim's anomie, Marx's alienation (both from species-being and from other individuals), and what Weber describes as the "iron cage" (if I remember it correctly).