Aurora Shooter’s Possible Motives Emerge
In regards to a possible motice, Aurora police chief Daniel Oates had hinted that Holmes had recently gone through a break up and that authorities were investigating the claim.
‘I’ve heard one morsel of information about a relationship that may or may not be true,’ he told CBS’ Face the Nation.
‘That’s why we have all our investigators working on this. That’s why we brought in the FBI behavioral analysts. They’re going to figure all that stuff out.’
It is also believed that Holmes was due to be evicted from his flat. The 24-year-old, who is now in police custody, pulled out of the university weeks before the deadly attack.
Neighbours told TMZ anyone living in the block had to be enrolled at the university otherwise you had 30 days to evacuate.
It is not known exactly when Holmes stopped going to classes but it is thought he was nearing the end of the 30-day grace period.
A former classmate from the University of Colorado suggested another cause for the killings, saying Holmes had lost touch with reality after becoming ‘obsessed’ with video games.
The classmate told the Daily Mail: ‘James was obsessed with computer games and was always playing role-playing games.
‘I can’t remember which one but it was something like World of Warcraft, one of those where you compete against people on the internet.
‘He did not have much of a life apart from that and doing his work. James seemed like he wanted to be in the game and be one of the characters.
‘It seemed that being online was more important to him than real life. He must have lost his sense of reality, how else can you shoot dozens of people you don’t know?’
Other acquaintances, who had worked with Holmes at a children’s summer camp in 2008, noted he was an outsider who was ‘shy and reserved’.
***
More coverage today at PJ Media:
What’s the “possible motive”? There’s nothing in this “story”.
The only thing I’m getting out of it is the possible “precipitating events” that the profilers always talk about. Breaking up, dropping out of your PhD program, and getting kicked out of your apartment would definitely qualify. But those are triggers, not motives. Something was wrong with him before any of them happened.
They’re symptoms, not triggers. At some point in the last year or so he cut ties with the world of reason. Everything else flows from that.
That makes sense. I guess a trigger would be something that happened TO him, not something he did intentionally. The events mentioned in the article could have been part of his plan or just the results of his increasingly disordered mental state.
You are right!
Besides, who gives a fig what his motive was?
I wish these people try to undeerstand evil; evil can’t and shouldn’t be explained. He is evil, and that’s that. Execute him!
Try him first. If guilty, then yes, make sure he’s eligible for the death penalty.
Maybe you didn’t mean it the way you wrote it, but we need to follow due process as a society.
He fits the pattern of schizophrenia better than evil. There is a difference. Hallucinations cause you to see and hear and feel things that aren’t there. After a while, you realize that you need to stop the zombies before they eat any more people.
The guy who killed two police officers at the U.S. Capitol in 1999 was schizophrenic. He had a perfectly logical explanation for why he did what he did: he needed to get to the Ruby satellite controller that would allow him to turn back time, so that he could stop the flesh-eating zombie menace that had taken over America.
Ditto for the serial killer in the early 1970s near Santa Cruz. His hallucinations caused him to realize that human sacrifice was necessary to prevent the San Andreas Fault from rupturing.
And there are many other similar examples.
Mental illness is the core of the vast majority of these mass murders, and many of these had already given clear signs of a need for treatment, visible to family, friends, and police.
Some are deranged and mentally ill. However, those people can’t carry out an attack requiring this level of organization, planning, patience and forethought.
More likely he is like the Son of Sam killer who wrote all the stuff about hearing voices and a dog talking to him in order to lay the groundwork for an insanity plea when he was caught. As he told the FBI profiler, he knew he would be caught eventually either by mistake or unlucky break. “Mindunter” John Douglas.
Sorry, ‘MindHunter’ by John Douglas, sorry for the misspelling.
The more likely precipitation is that the shooter never had anybody to break up with.
Now that the Julias can depend on Uncle Sugar for everything, they don’t need to give the time of day to a gawky nerd who was good a fantasy games but not at strutting like a gangsta.
There’s no fury like the fury of a 24 year old male who can’t get laid.
Just ask about a hunded million 24 year old Muslim males. 20 of them found a way to release their frustration and fury 9/11/2001.
Motives aside, where did Holmes get the money to buy all the equipment he had?
Jack, a lot of that equipment was imaginary. Instead of full-out SWAT head to toe bulletproof, for example, he turned out to have actually been wearing a black nylon “tactical” vest — which is to say a fishing vest but made out of black nylon instead of green. The most recent newspaper reports here say he had 1 AR-15, 1 Glock and 1 shotgun, which totals up around $2000 — or the price of a good bicycle, which grad students seem to be able to manage usually. Add $300 for the stuff he bought from Tactical Mike or whatever the hell the website was. The “sophisticated explosives” in his apartment turn out to be the sort of stuff anyone with the Anarchist’s Cookbook could make in a trip to the grocery store, and the “incendiary” stuff was ten gallons of gasoline.
Basically, never believe first reports in the legacy press.
As long as I’m commenting, also, a lot of silly people on the coasts are saying “why wasn’t anyone suspicious when he bought all those guns?” — in Colorado, a rifle, a pistol, and a shotgun isn’t a suspicious number of guns — it’s a Christmas list.
I read that he had grant money, too, which they thought might have helped him finance this.
We need more attention paid to mental illness, which we as a society still don’t deal with very well. Guns are just the tool, not the cause of these tragedies. There are a lot of mentally ill people out there falling through the cracks. Many times, the signs were there. In this case, it sounds like it was not as apparent.
If you have a credit card, and you don’t expect to pay the upcoming bill–or you expect to be regarded as a hero for having killed all the zombies in the theater–the cost is not a problem.
For those of you who remember “Wings” (Tim Daly, Crystal Bernard & Steven Weber), there was one episode about a serial murderer, in which Brian (Weber) says (paraphrasing), “Why is it neighbors always say of a serial killer ‘He was a nice boy, very quiet, kept to himself, always said hello’. It’s never ‘He was a raving lunatic, I was terrified, just WAITIN’ for the chainsaw to come bursting through the wall!’ “
The greatest deceit the devil ever perpetrated was convincing the world he does not exist.
There’s your motive, evil. If you can understand it, seek help, but if he’s rationale is something you cannot wrap your brain around, you’re normal. There is no motive but evil, anything else is just an excuse.
PIMF “but if his rationale” not “but if he’s rationale”
Exactly. He did it because he’s evil. He planned it, selecting a gun-free zone which would be crowded. Anything related to TDKR is red-herring (like his hair). Like other convicts/criminals he’s probably gone through the handbook of psychiatric disorders and acting out the symptoms of the one he’s chosen to shift blame from his choices/actions to a ‘condition’.
The only thing that precipitated this was his choice/decision/planning to act.
There’s a picture of a little girl at the top of this piece.
??????????????
Whos is she? Is she one of the victims? Relevance please?
Thanks.
Put your mouse over the picture and it gives you her name (Veronica Moser) – and the fact that she was the youngest victim.
Lose the video games and stick to books. ‘Nuff said.
But stay away from “The Catcher in the Rye.”
Of course, we’re blaming videogames and the internet now. It’s not like the guy with the wild look in that courtroom and bright orange hair is crazy or anything.