14 dead and 50 injured in mass shooting in Colorado.

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The point is that understanding why he made his choice might allow us to prevent someone else from making the same choice.

If criminal justice is to mean anything, we must seek not only to punish crimes that have been committed, but also to do what we can to prevent future crimes from taking place. Since the liberty of the individual cannot unreasonably be constrained, we must turn our attention to the motivations for crime, and look to how we can mitigate those.

Gay or straight partner?
I know being gay would not be a motive, but I'm curious because that would be the first time I've heard of a shooter being gay.

After reading a profile of Holme's background, I believe that kids that doesn't function socially should be placed in a practical work-training program from 7th grade. That would have made his life easier.

They are not saying one instead of the other, they are saying both--that he was a smart, nice guy, but also a loner who seemed to rarely interact with friends or have girlfriends.

Being atypical doesn't mean not being exemplary or having records of misconduct. Most weirdness isn't, in fact, bad (at least in this sense). What I'm concerned about is that his success may have been masking severe emotional and developmental weaknesses. History abounds with geniuses who were exemplary in their fields, and well-intentioned in general, but who were also deeply troubled inside.

Someone who grows up being always "the genius" may feel that he is not exactly invincible, but exempt from some of the troubles and weaknesses of mankind. If he was ahead since being a very young child, he might not even have any awareness of a time when he "chose" this view of himself, it could have been more just his reality. Maybe he even showed episodes of disturbed emotion as a little kid, but this was written off as him being "special" or excused because he was otherwise exemplary. This is just speculation based on my own experiences, but I could easily see this having happened.

Then, if he no longer felt his exemplary talent got him what he needed in life, he could have felt an "identity vacuum". Someone in the courtroom said he looked like a "pathetic freak", and if that was the identity he had been made to assume when his academic career began to fail, one can look at the shooting as his attempt to be what others wanted him to be, yet the most powerful, self-respecting form of that freak identity he could be.

Meanwhile, in Africa....

I'm not sure if there's some repressed homosexuality since he was looking for both males and females on Adultfriendfinders.

Isn't that bisexuality?

Even spree killers get laid more often than me?
That's depressing. And I'm serious right now.

Maybe if your face wasn't so serious?
Kings are intimidating, especially divine ones.

Most psychopaths have a history of bad behavior though. They don't usually do well academically, not due to lack of intelligence but lack of patience and discipline. They usually report feeling "bored" or "empty" when not engaging in risky or outright predatory behavior. It seems so strange for someone to suddenly have a drive to do something so evil without any prior hints at all. But maybe he always lacked a conscience and was merely held back from acting out out of fear of the consequences, until something disappointed him so much that he no longer felt he had anything to lose.

The culture of violence and guns in america is partially to blame for this incident as well as the perpetrator of the crime.
american politicians have their hands tied and they will not do anything in regards to gun control laws to help prevent future crimes like this from occurring in the future.

The American constitutional states the universal right to own guns is ingrained in America and supported by American law/constitution, conservatives and libertarians. The calls by liberals for gun control and restrictions will fall on deaf ears because the politicians have their hands tied and can not change the American constitution.

I don't know, I was just speaking out of my you know what.

My opinion has changed in the past couple days. I don't really see sociopath in him anything. I see him as either deluded or helpless.

I was talking about malignant narcissism, not the kind of narcissism where a person simply knows they are smarter than others objectively. This really isn't narcissism in my view. Yes, I create my own definitions.

I think PS is unlikely for the reasion you mention, however some sort of psychosis such as psychotic depression or manic psychosis is a possibility. The third possibility is SSRI-induced mania/homicidal thoughts, which have been documented in a few previous cases. It is rare but it does happen.

I know from experience that it is possible to earn straight a's and b's in school while hearing voices continuously and believing that people are plotting against you. The difference between me and the shooter is I never wanted revenge. And I do think I would come to my senses before I snapped entirely.

I have never reached that "obliterative" state of mind.

I made a post about the concept of pseudocommanders. No one responded but my guess is this is the kind of state of mind he is was in for one reason or another. Perhaps he felt he was being mercilessly persecuted when in fact no one even paid any attention to him.

I can relate to this - everything but the homicidal thoughts.

Ted Kaczynski, makes this guy look sane in comparison as to how he handled himself in his trial, but he was a Harvard graduate and a professor diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He refused to acknowledge mental illness, which may be the case for Holmes as well.

If so, it would almost be impossible to provide an adequate defense, however I don't think he comes close to meeting the level of intelligence that Kaczynski had in defending his assertion that he was not mentally ill.

The hardest part of schizophrenia, can be not being able to admit one has a problem, but Kacyzynski was a rare case of schizophrenia, in that it did not destroy his ability for communication well through adulthood, without treatment, even though his actions and rationale for those actions were not rational, per most people's idea of reality.

Only 1 successful insanity case out of 35,000 insanity pleas in Colorado cases.
That is a very poor record, virtually 0% success rate and almost 100% failure rate. Insanity defense simply does not work in Colorado.

The insanity defense will not work in Colorado and rarely does the insanity defense work in the US.

Makes sense. For a while, I was actually thinking that he was suffering from microsleep episodes.

Oddly the thing I find freakiest about this guy is that he had almost nothing online, no facebook, nothing. Just a myspace with no friends except the founder who everyone has to be friends with. I don't know why, but that's what I found freakiest.