An interesting article from the Associated Press indicates what was going on in the VT killer’s mind.

It  was hatred, pure hatred.

AP reports:

He delivered a snarling, profanity-laced tirade about rich ”brats” and their ”hedonistic needs.” . . .

‘Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats,” says Cho, a South Korean immigrant whose parents work at a dry cleaners in suburban Washington. ”Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn’t enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything.” . . .

Cho repeatedly suggests he was picked on or otherwise hurt.

”You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience,” he says, apparently reading from his manifesto. ”You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people.”

As I noted in my earlier item on this situation, this is pure egomania. Comparing himself to Christ!

The AP story and other sources make it clear that numerous people observed that this man was dangerously disturbed—what any sensible person would call evil—and urged him to "get help."

That was an entirely ill-conceived reaction.

A person consumed with hatred does not believe that he needs help. He believes that others need to change. When they do not, he reacts with violence. He believes his reaction to be entirely justified.

This is precisely what the VT killer expressed in the videotapes made between his two bouts of murders. In addition, it is precisely what he expressed in the months beforehand.

The suggestion that he needed "help" is something to which such a person would never voluntarily submit. It is a delusion of our theraputic culture, the notion that people do what they do entirely because of a string of causal events and experiences, and that finding the key will reverse the conditions that led to the "pathology."

But hatred is real. We late moderns seem to believe that there is no such thing. But there is. People who have been brought up in "bad" environments know this all too well, and the fact that our media increasingly consist of individuals who have come from relatively privileged backgrounds and not risen from the streets and farms (as was common in the first half of the last century) means that the reality of hatred is entirely beyond their understanding.

They are under the Rousseauian delusion that everybody is good at heart and corrupted only by the rules of society. In fact, as we Christians know, the very opposite is true.

Hatred is real. It is not a generalized feeling toward some abstract "class," as political correctness codes and the delusional claims of media "experts" and social activists suggest. It is a powerful, personal antipathy toward others that seems to the individual to require corrective action. When society does not take action, the individual does.

The VT killer saw his prosperous, happy neighbors as enemies who deserved punishment and whom society was unjustly allowing to go about unscathed and in fact rewarding for their iniquity. This, in his mind, had to be rectified.

Hatred is a choice, not an unfortunate illness. No pill will cure it, and no amount of talk will send it away. People filled with hatred mean it, and they mean to do something about it.

We must understand that and be prepared to respond wisely and judiciously when it manifests itself—before it results in horrors such as the VT murders.