During a seven-hour standoff with police, the Case Western University shooter killed one person and wounded two. This article says:
What I don’t understand is why only one person was killed. Don’t get me wrong-- I’m grateful that no further carnage was done, but don’t understand how the people in the building managed to elude the killer who fired hundreds of shots.
How was his apparent plan of mass carnage foiled? I’m consistantly amazed by random shootings which, mercifully, yeild few victims. Are the killers bad shots? Is their “heart” just not in it once they begin? Do the intended victims manage to hide so well that the killers can’t find them? A locked door isn’t much of a match to a determined killer with a gun. Surely, if he had wanted to, he could have found them. What was he shooting at, if not people?
It’s hard to hit a moving target. Most of these psychos have only ever fired at still targets like bottles and trees. Real-life human targets tend to not sit still and be shot at like the nutjobs are used to.
I found a site about bullying that details the number of deaths in what it calls “Prominent spree killings and spree killers” … at Bully Online. I was prompted to go looking after recalling a grisly incident in Louisville, Ky., in 1989. Disgruntled employee Joseph Wesbecker killed seven people in a printing plant. (Prozac was partially blamed; there was a lawsuit. Details in the link.)
Anyway, if you read through these, you’ll see often many more are killed. Recall the killing of the preschoolers in England a few years back, and 24 dead at the Luby’s Cafeteria in Texas.
They realize that in essence what they have begun is begin the timer until their own destruction. They are freeing themselves from the petty concerns of the rational world, and they similarly have no real concern with a high bodycount. They’re just on autopilot until someone gets them or they run out of people to kill and shoot themselves.
It must be because they didn’t play enough Doom. Or that they saw too many John Woo films and went after their victims in the “two guns at once, held sideways gangsta-style”, and thus had all the accuracy of a blind drunk trying to piss in a doormouse’s nostril.
The fact of the matter is that it’s not all that easy - despite what Hollywood may say - to shoot a gun, especially at something that’s moving, especially while YOU’RE moving. Cops and soldiers go through hours of training and drilling. An amateur that managed to get a bullet into the “sweet spot” on a paper target might suddenly think he’s a badass like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, but chances are he spent more time hating the world than he did actually practicing his psychotic rampage.