The killer here seems to have been mentally deranged - I've seen his disturbing video - but mental trouble of course is triggered by something. He refers to a feeling of being ever the underdog (it's clear too he had rather limited financial means and almost no friends on campus), of feeling trapped in a ditch and while I can't know how that would push you to maul down thirty-two unarmed people in a peaceful country, I get the feeling of anger it can drive you into if you'll feel everyone else seems to be better off and have better options to move on - money, family contacts, the means to travel and to have a nice vacation. Virginia Tech is one of the more high-ranking tech universities in the US, isn't it? So the body of students is likely to come from well-to-do families and to an outsider it might seem a slightly bratty place, a place where you're expected to have money in your pocket all the time but not to talk about how to get it. Again, this is anything but an excuse for this awful killing, and most of all I'm surprised by the fact that a student can so easily get heavy arms and bring them on to the campus (while student and university buildings in Europe are not gated in any way, it's much less easy to actually get heavy firearms legally, you can't just mail order them from one day to the next). And surely he must have been doing some training shoots to be able to use those guns - why didn't anyone notice?

It's always hard to imagine what goes on in the mind of a lone assassin like this but I'd recommend anyone who can stomach it now to read a short story by Joyce Carol Oates - Last Days (title piece of a collection of stories of 1985; it can be found inexpensively at Amazon; worth reading too for its stories of Eastern Europe before the fall of the Iron Curtain). It's the story/inner monologue of a young Jewish student, highly gifted but spiralling into more and more violent thoughts and a sense of glorious, pseudo-Messianic mission to kill himself and one or more prominent people of his Jewish congregation.

He's modeled on a real guy that Ms Oates met at university in the mid-sixties, shortly before he did, roughly, what is depicted at the end of the story: theatrically taking the Rabbi hostage in the synagogue, reading a "manifesto" to the gathered people and then shooting the Rabbi dead, point blank and, instantly after that, himself (there's also an earlier story,. In a Region of Ice which deals with the same events - haven't read that one though it won her a prize). It's very unsettling, a bit too detailed and dense sometimes but it somehow corners in both his mania and the confused reactions of the people around him - student buddies, his dad, his psychiatrist, friends - as they sense how he's drifting toward some kind of fatal turn (or is he just acting....?)