excerpt from an email I sent to my brother about the Virginia Tech shooter

Hmm, interesting.
What boggles my can of worms is the fact that when people try to dissect this abnormal and extreme behavior, they are (as it seems to me) relating to it from their own perspective, or from their own society's legitimate perspective. There are societies in the globe today that would not react in such horror and disgust to incidents of innocents being murdered randomly. They might even choose to glorify it and dream of becoming the next ones to commit murder.

We try to understand this from a "all of humanity" point of view, which often is unrealistic, at least in my opinion. Calling him a murderous psycho draws a very clear line between us and the perpetrator. It puts our fears and inability to understand and cope at a safe distance from the humanity of the murderer.

The analysts, psychologists and other professionals who are trying to come up with their best analogies and explanations are using their own perspective towards modern society and, more important in this case, morals as a reference or starting point to whatever they come up with and decide to publish in the papers.

I don't know. I sometimes try to understand such an outrageous event by imagining what went on inside the killer's head, maybe even trying to feel empathy towards his reasons.
It's common to say "oh this guy was nuts" or "this guy had XYZ syndrome" or any other psycho-analytical term, but I always feel that doing so is sometimes counterproductive, in that it shallows the depth of our understanding (nice wording, eh?). It prevents us from reaching new, albeit abstract opinions about what may have caused this, and how it can be prevented in the future.

OR :

Maybe it's all because I've never studied this stuff and want to appear as smart as those who did. In any case, he was nuts, and it sucks that he was able to walk around for like 3 hours shooting up the place, leaving and coming back. That's just crazy. What's more important than why he did it, is what the relevant authorities are going to do to prevent this in the future.