Than God no kittens were killed. The outrage would be 20 pages long by now.
Bitter divorce? People have been threw worse.
Lost his job? Him and a lotta other people in this economy.
Wsn’t eligible for unemployment? Appeal the decision.
If he had “only” grabbed a gun and shot people, I might maybe believe some of this. But he had a passport, $17K (I work and I don’t have $17K in cash) and incendiary devices. He planned the murder and planned an escape, which means he was not insana in the legal sense.
He planned a horrible massacre and when his escape plan didn’t go right, he killed himself rather than face the music.
I have ZERO sympathy for anyone but his innocent victims.
I don’t believe in “free will.” Some combination of genetics and life circumstances molded this man into what he became. I think a small number of people are simply abberations and are prone to doing stuff like this. But getting mad at this fact of life is as usefull as getting mad at a tornado.
Yeah, there you go. Empty the prisons; no one is accountable for their actions. :rolleyes:
On more careful reading of the news, you are absolutely right. It is hard to write off wanting to kill 25 people as a crime of passion. More so if kids are included. I could see wanting to kill lousy ex-wife and maybe a parent-in-law or two, but 25 people is just crazy.
I retract that part.
On the guy being nice 10 minutes before, and not wanting to make too much of a point of it since it is not a core issue here, it does seem like he was a nice guy before this whole mess. Many people on the OP’s second link talk of him as a nice friendly guy.
One can only wonder what makes a likable guy go this bad.
Likability has little or no connection to the capacity for violence. Some of the most prolific and violent serial killers in history have been likable people. Y’know, when they’re not actually killing people, I mean.
No. That don’t fly. I’ve had to deal with poverty from a early age. This asshole was a sociopath. I don’t care if a warlord massacred your whole family and raped your sheep there’s no way a decent person can blow an 8 year old away.
You did get the part, did you not, where the burns he sustained made him think he looked a bit too conspicuous to carry on with his getaway plan, so he shot himself instead?
You mean the burns he sustained ** at his own hand**?
No. I only see where it says he shot himself. No reason is given.
Pardo received third degree burns to his arms when he set off the homemade incendiary device. The red Santa suit was fused to his skin.
I can see how that would make him a little too conspicuous to pass through airport security.
Thanks, but your speculation is irrelevant to the point.
According to this fairly well-detailed article, she’s been released from the hospital, so luckily it wasn’t as serious as it originally sounded. She will never look at Christmas or Santa the same, poor girl.
The way people are trying to rationalize this heinous crime is blowing my mind. According to the general consensus, the woman whose MySpace comments drove a 13 year old girl to suicide should be drawn and quartered, but this guy gets off the outrage hook because he went through a bitter divorce in which possibly he got the short end of the stick? WTF kind of double standard are we talking about here? These excuses and rationalizations are not going to help anything. I’m genuinely sorry his life was turning out so shitty. A lot of us have had to deal with shitty life circumstances at one time or another. Our solution has not been to massacre innocent people.
As far as the ‘‘likable guy’’ thing goes, you’d be surprised how many fine upstanding pillars of your community do horrible, evil things. The fact that so few people can wrap their heads around this possibility greatly contributes to the endemic nature of abuse, addiction, and a great many other social ills. Person X cannot truly be a wife-beater because Person X is a nice guy whereas wife-beaters are monsters. The two are not mutually exclusive, you know. I guarantee you that some acquaintance you love, some guy you work with or some woman you always chat with at the grocery store, who gave you a ride or loaned you five bucks or who always has a funny joke, goes home and beats the shit out of their kids every night. It doesn’t make your perception of that person wrong, it just makes it incomplete.
What KGS said isn’t speculation. Pardo’s burns were severe enough to ruin his getaway plan. I suppose you can speculate that without the burns, he would have killed himself anyway, but that’s giving him too much credit.
Of course it is. Unless you have a link to an article about his suicide note explaining it.
It’s speculation that the local police are indulging in also, as I’ve seen the police spokesman giving this as an explanation on the news. That being said, I don’t care if he shot himself because he had a sudden moment of guilt, or because of the burns, or because a magic sky pixie told him to. He’s still a stain on humanity (well, WAS) and is fully responsible for every one of his actions.
Ruffian, I’m so sorry you and yours had a front row seat. How very horrid.
This shooter/arsonist also caused ten kids to be orphaned.
The whole thing is FUBB.
The threat of punishment is one factor that can influence peoples decisions, so even if Free Will is an illusion, that doesn’t mean prisons should be abolished.
Our actions our brought about by electrochemical activity in our brains. This activity is caused by prior events outside of one “self” and probably by some quantum randomness as well. Taking this into account, X number of people will go batshit crazy in a given year and there’s only so much we can do about it. It’s simply a hazard of life, like tornadoes and lightning strikes.
Bruce Pardo had no criminal history, he just did this crazy shit out of the blue and apparently wasn’t deterred by the threat of jail or death. There’s probably nothing we can do to stop freak occurances like this, getting worked up about this is simply a waste of emotional energy.