***

My thoughts have been preoccupied with the Virginia Tech killings, though I don't really have anything coherent to add to the pages of available commentary. So the perpetrator was a psychological train wreck, an isolated, uncommunicative and hostile person, possibly schizophrenic. The thing I wonder about is how he might have been helped – where, in the course of his development, did things go so badly awry? Who could have intervened, and when? Were there things that should have been done that weren't, or vice versa?

The factors that some have cited – loneliness, paranoia, immaturity, self-absorption, romantic failure, social humiliation, inability to understand consequences, indifference to the suffering of others, attraction to gun culture and violent fantasy – are present in many young people (and, frequently enough, older people). But they are usually not present to such an extreme degree. Most people also, along the way, find social support to moderate their loneliness. Or, even if socially unskilled, they are able to take refuge in an activity that sustains them – art, religion, career goals or a vocation, or just something they do particularly well.

Instead, we have a 23-year-old male who could not establish relationships or have an impact on people other than puzzling and scaring them. A person with no capacity to deal with the social environment of college, thrust into the laissez-faire environment that college happens to be. A person whose few efforts to communicate just came across as bizarre. A person who stalked women. His mom asking his roommate to "help him". And finally, a shooter trying to kill as much of the world as he could.