Mass killing of one sort or another

In the wake of yesterday's horrific campus shooting, the Washington Post has a "Why do they do it?" article. The answer:

They're not looking for highs -- they're depressed, angry and humiliated. They tend to be rejected in some romantic relationship, or are sexually incompetent, are paranoid, and their resentment builds...

"It's about suicide," Welner says. "It's about tying one's masculinity to destruction." (emphasis mine)

If this is right, then mass shootings are motivated by much the same things that I believe motivate suicide terrorism in the West.

Here's the general timeline that I see happening (in the case of Islamic terrorism): A young man grows up with conservative values - masculinity is measured by marriage, hard work, and good standing in the community. Then, he is abruptly thrown into a liberal Western environment where the ability of a man to get sex is the measure of manhood. He's not as good at this as the men around him, since he grew up conservative and never practiced picking up chicks. So his once-strong masculinity gets instantly flushed down the drain, causing the massive wounded angry resentment that most men feel when their masculinity is trampled on. So he has two choices - hate himself, or hate and condemn the society around him. Most people choose the former. And of the people who choose the latter, most express their resentment peacefully, through angry music or writing or radical politics or bouts of depression. But a few go over the edge.

And if there's someone actively telling angry young men that society is the enemy, that the conservative values they grew up with are right after all, and that a suicide attack is the only way to restore their manly pride, well, those men will be a little more likely to go over the edge than the average college student. That's how radical madrassas are able to breed young terrorists - the rage was already there.

Anyway, everyone knows the phrase "angry young men." Well, deep down, we realize that men are angry because they can't get laid - and, probably, because everyone is around them is telling them that "if you can't get laid, you're a loser." Some people are bad losers. Some are real, real bad.

Update: The killer, Seung-Hui Cho, who was born in Korea but raised in the U.S., "expressed disappointment" with his Christian religion, railed against "debauchery," and picked as his first victim a girl who left him. So far, he seems to fit my angry-young-terrorist profile pretty exactly...