Less of a response to bowser, and more to the thread in general:

Everyone is ultimately responsible for their own Emotional reactions, content and security. Period.

However, responsibility is always a two way street. From what I can see, the point I'm about to make has much less to do with VT and more to do with the prior episodes of school-context youth violence (Columbine, etc).

Any time a culture/group/etc acts in violent, callous and reprehensible ways to arbitrarily selected individuals, they run the risk of creating monsters (IE: chained beaten neglected dogs turn into violent irreprable beasts that must ultimately be put down). This does not excuse the lashing out of the monster against the group, by any means, however- it is not exactly unpredictable that such monsters will arise in the context.

however, what it does not do either is validate the mobbing of so-called 'loners' and 'misfits'. IE- the characteristics of being a loner or a misfit has in itself no determinant relationship to them turning into sociopathic monsters. However, being brutalized by your society certainly does.

It seems like our country largely missed the lessons of Columbine- act in ways to cease the violence being perpetrated by the 'mob' against some particular kids. Instead, we seem to watch the kids all the harder, became more 'big brother' and hyper-reactive to the smallest idle adolscent 'violent fantasy', and treat misfits and loaners like they themselves are criminals.

I grew up in a small oil town in Oklahoma, where large portions of even the highschool kids could not read at 1st grade levels. It wasn't until I switched to a school in a larger town that school wasn't just this place I went to waste my time, watch my back, and keep my 'big stick' at ready (and even there, it wasn't too much better). Luckily, I had being a big kid (the largest in my grade) and farm work on my side- but the smaller and weaker outcasts... jesus. They were doomed to a life of tauntings, beatings and worse. Not being a violent person, the toughest choices in my life when I decided to finally 'drop the hammer' on the smaller kids trying to beat me instead of 'turning the cheek' and/or walking away. Everyone runs out of cheeks eventually, though.

Now, as I said- the VT shooter looks to be a run-of-the mill sociopath that wasn't caught and incarcerated soon enough. IE: instead of killing or brutalizing just one person, getting a record, and getting introduced to the penal system- his first real forray into socipoathic behavior was killing 30+ people. I actually am not inclined to take the VT shooter as any sort of indictment of our society at this point- but rather a commentary that with 300,000,000 people in this country, we're going to have some fundamentally broken and dangerously insane people walking around.

The reaction to the VT shooter, however, is a commentary on our society. Idiots with political axes to grind of all types, people who read this through a binary filter of 'some people just can't take personal responsibility for ...' etc, Media that can not provide reasoned context for the story-du-jour. All of this has spoken far worse for our culture than the fact that out of 300,000,000 people we had a sociopath who slipped through unnoticed and by chance, luck or sheer bloody mindedness found a soft target on which to feast their insanity on.

Yeti