Freedomain Radio

Remember the 16 year old kid who shot up the mall in Omaha in December '07? Rolling Stone has researched his home life and did a story on it. It demonstrates the lack of a lot of the principles we talk about here.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/22248593/everyone_will_remember_me_as_some_sort_of_monster/1

...and bad statism.

I'm trying to figure out, though, why he shot up strangers...

That's so sad when the victim is blamed.  Though I always think of statist solutions and I know there's got to be a better way.  Take away the kids: but the system for adoption is just as bad.  Permits for breeding: freedom of choice.  This is such a hard issue to deal with in our current system.

Stefan Molyneux:

I'm trying to figure out, though, why he shot up strangers...

Some potential ideas about that:

( 1 ) Strangers have been actively avoiding, or looking on indifferently, at his situation for his entire life. Perhaps he blamed them the most, since it would seem to him that they should have had the most compassion and the most capacity to do something to help him (since his parents and guardians were all hell-bent on brutalizing him, getting angry at them wouldn't do much good). An analogy: if you're attacked by an insane rabid dog, and every passer-by just ignores or stares on while it's happening, your anger is going to be mostly with them, and not with the dog, I would think.

( 2 ) Perhaps this was his way of destroying the world, before he destroyed himself? Killing strangers is sort of like taking a stab at the anonymous "whole world"...

Stefan Molyneux:

...and bad statism.

I'm trying to figure out, though, why he shot up strangers...

The article said he wanted to take some bad people with him. If I had to venture a guess, I would say he was socially mocked in high school for being awkward, and the mall probably had a significant group of high schoolers.