Really helps to meet people in person and talk with them, might still not necessarily like the individual but it still makes a huge difference. Through text alone we only have limited information upon which to base judgements.

Norm didn't post this to freak us out, he is a compassionate young man struggling like most of us to make sense out of what is just not sensible. Or not exactly to make sense out of this, more precisely to say just what he said: What the hell is wrong with people?

Remember, we don't all have the same motivations, life experience, or perspectives. I might write XYZ because I earnestly want to share something that I think is important, while another person might only write XYZ because they want to confuse and upset us.

I myself am curious about how we all can become media literate and how we can sort out the best media diet for ourselves and our families. I believe that the wash of horrible news affects us much more than we know and that it also doesn't serve increasing public safety at all.

it has happened before, i think it was in california.same story father & son i don,t want to get in to the details but it has happened  before here in the state of america.  they said he was on a whole bunch of speed and went through some kind of psychosis. i  think it was 5 or more years ago. like the old saw "there ain't  nothing new under  the sun" or history tends  to repeat itself.

It's schlock journalism.  Like the donut appeal article.  It plays to a lowest common denominator.  I don't think it is instructive, or analytical. 

It's like the crazy woman who drowned her two children by putting her car in the lake, or the crazy woman in TX who killed all of her children. Do people do crazy, horrible stuff?   Yes, I think they do.  Why do they do it?  They are nuts.  They are completely unhinged in some fundamental way at the moment they do these terrible things.  Read the Ann Rule books on sociopathic and psychopathic killers if you want to get in deep with this stuff. 

Are we more likely to be better people if we pay attention to these stories or if we spend these precious minutes reading King's speeches on MLK Jr. Day?  I'm going with the King speeches.

This post would be meaningful to me if it was posed in the context of should there be capital punishment for some crimes?  (I would still think probably not, but I am on the fence if a death sentence was carried out with a morphine drip - a sympathetic and regrettable death instead of a horrible, vengeful process like is currently used) 

Aside from the question about why this guy would do this awful crime, why would you post about it? There's a law in the universe that says that what you pay attention to in life you will get more of.  So if you look at this kind of horrific crime, you will find it.  It may serve to support your political views about law and order to post the most outrageous single crime you can come across, it generates a passion for locking folks up, it ignores the banal nature of most crime and how disconnected most crime is from this kind of psychopathic craziness.

Thanks for being somewhat non-reactive to all the reactions you got on this one.

I like both of the points - the warning and freedom to blog. I have been wondering about the docent function which is why I ask the docent question.