Rampage killer Chris Harper-Mercer was an Aspie

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It's a causation argument :

1. His AS symptoms:
- loner
- no girlfriend
- "other people think he's crazy"
- learning disabilities/ emotional & behavior problems
- booted out of the military (unable to hold a job)

2. The symptoms caused depression / emotional instability.

3. Which caused him to act.

It is pretty fascinating question though... why does this keep happening in America so often?

There's a super novel by Lionel Shriver called We Need to Talk about Kevin about this phenomena!

I saw a reporter (Jacob Ward) talking about this conundrum the other day. He suggested three hoops that many of these rampage killers go through... #1. The notion that they should be famous, that they are special, that they deserve attention, power, love, romance. #2 Some sort of personal disaster, big insight, crushing defeat, big quarrel with immediate associates. #3 Access to weapons.

I saw in the news that Chris Harper-Mercer wrote some "manifesto" and was angry that he didn't have a girlfriend and was still a "virgin."

I strongly disagree with #1 on that list, there's no way to know the mindset of a person unless they tell us. It could just merely be "making a statement" not necessarily out of a desire for fame or some sense of self entitlement. We can't know what goes through a mass murderer's head unless they tell us, everything else is just uneducated speculation. #2 and #3 can be verified after the fact (or during in the case of #3), but #1 is pure armchair psychology that says more about the speaker than it does about anybody it's directed at. If one must have three points for the argument #1 should be replaced by social isolation-- it's verifiable. It sounds like #1 is based more on a disdain for the current American cultural message which pushes fame and self entitlement, of which I would agree with, but I wouldn't apply motive unless the mass murderer left some sort of evidence that pointed to that conclusion.

Timothy McVeigh, definately sending a message. Columbine killers, revenge, sending a message. Seung-Hui cho, revenge, sending a message (possible overtones of #1 on the list). Anders Breivik, sending a message. James Holmes, revenge. Adam Lanza, hard to say, almost no evidence of his mental state or life for that matter.

Why not utilize prostitutes?
They are universally available and it permanently removes the internal stigma of virginity.
How is violence a better outlet than prostitution?
There are plenty of men that can't get lovers that access prostitutes...better than killing people!

CNN picked it up:

Online writings about guns, Asperger's linked to Oregon shooter's mom

I guess I must accept the sad truth, then. ALL aspies are mass murderers, or potential mass murderers.

After all, I've made "jokes" like "We don't need guns. Its more fun to kill someone with your bare hands anyway." or "Use poison on your victims it's a lot less messy than shooting or stabbing them."

I am a loner. Loners are freaks and psychopaths it's not natural humans are supposed to be social and bla bla bla so lock me up or cure my Asperger's with bleach...

I hate the entire world.

I think people are going to start claiming that people with Asperger's are violent.

Well, according to This Article, the most common characteristics are:

1) Male
2) White
3) Between the ages of 15 and 25
4) Depression
5) Recognizably intelligent
6) Socially awkward /shy
7) Social outcast
8) Meticulous planning of the shooting

I would add two other characteristics:

[opinion=mine]

9) Megalomania, typified by delusional fantasies of power, relevance, omnipotence, and especially by over-inflated self-esteem - "I am not crazy ... I'm the only sane one here ... Everybody else is crazy ..." Is a common theme, expressed or implied, in many of the written manifestos that I've read.

10) Feelings of persecution, as if everyone (especially authority figures and women) was picking on them, looking down on them, or singling them out for scorn and derision.

[/opinion]

I could be wrong, of course. My training and profession are in the field of Electrical Engineering, not in Behavioral Psychology.

I would say that ANYONE can be violent, no matter their condition.

In my case, the violence is directed towards myself during meltdowns.

I saw my therapist today, and he point blank asked me if my husband owned any guns.

This was an out of the blue question. Of course, he knows my husband is on the spectrum.

Has there been a funeral for the shooter yet? I can't imagine keeping that on the down low.

It does seem like guns were Chris' "special interest." It is mentioned in the original story that he was shy and reserved unless he was talking about guns.

You have no idea how often I wondered that. Still waiting on a satisfactory answer.

Hmm. I don't think of it this way as I don't believe in God. The whole idea of God just seems so illogical. I was always the kid who asked the hard questions that were undoubtedly going to land me in hell and blah blah. Not to be a smart*ss or to prove how cool I was or whatever, but because, I don't know...I'd hear other people tell these God stories, claim to even "hear" or "feel" this invisible thing...and so on and so-forth...and it was like the Emperor's new clothes to me...I would think, Am I supposed to be playing along? Is this a game, are they pretending, are they mentally insane and I should back off, or...what?

I also wondered from a very very early age: if people said that Zeus and Thor and so on had only been myths, and used the ridiculousness and impossibility of the stories to support this idea, then what left the Judeo/Christian God out of that equation?

I don't disbelieve the possibility of a God and I realize I might be 100% wrong.

Anyway, I think life's only purpose is to live. I think everything that exists is there to live long enough to seek pleasure, avoid pain and reproduce. Therefore, life is going to be WAY harder on anything - or anyone - that doesn't fit the mold of its environment (natural environment), its clan/tribe/group environment (if it's a communal/social animal, as humans are), or who physically is different. I don't really believe in "fair" or "unfair." I also try to think of the "unfairness" of my being different in the opposite direction: Okay, I have this major difference, but, for example, I have legs. Is it unfair that I got legs whereas any given other person might have no legs, or paralyzed legs, or cancer in one of the legs and so on...? If so, why was I so special that I never had to deal with those things? That's not fair either.

These are just my views, and I don't feel everyone should hold them, just am expressing them here.

I thought that he was an Aspie by his personality traits identified the day that it happened I just had feeling, and I looked up some information about the special school that he attended as a teen.I can identify with some of what Tweety wrote about her and her adult son both Aspies, minus the guns that is.

God did not do this, and it was not done to "us". Chris Harper-Mercer did this to his teachers and fellow students. God merely allowed it to happen.

Why? You'll have to seek God for that answer.

What then created your unique self-identity?

To me others developing complex biology and mechanisms of behaviour over millions of years of 'evolution' seems fathomable. What's less so is the individual self-awareness that we experience. Is it just a carbon-copy self-awareness filtered through the lens of personal biology and circumstance? Is it an amorphic mass consciousness that becomes super-condensed and almost self-contained within certain structures? Or do we have a soul given to us by the invisible watchmaker?

It's like distributing software with a unique code or serial that is imprinted. But this imprinting takes the form of a fourth dimension, which is not directly observable from the outside. How are those unique properties distributed?

I can imagine self-awareness arising as part of a greater than the sum of its parts biology. I just can't connect that to the unique experience that I experience. It makes sense when talked of others but not of the self.