Personally, I think its a triad. We have inborn traits, we have familial and then societal/cultural influence, and then we have personal responsibility.

We are not slaves to our nature or our cultures. We have self awareness and choice. We also have a duty to ourselves and our souls. If we want freedom and free agency, we have to be willing to accept responsibility for our actions and embrace accountability. You gotta be right with you, develop a moral compass that enriches you and makes your life worthwhile.

I also don’t believe in picking one avenue and putting blame solely there or letting it scrub responsibility from the other two.

In this instance, even if you believe that he was a victim of cultural forces and bad parenting, why should that completely absolve him from making the decision to kill? Plenty of people have bad parents. They don’t become murderers. Plenty of people live/have lived in cultures that were committing heinous acts. They stood opposed, often at the cost of their own lives. So clearly there’s a choice to be made there about who we want to be and how we choose to interact with the world around us.

Likewise, recognizing that he may have some wires crossed and may have made a methodic and planned decision to kill doesn’t mean that we as a society get to turn a blind eye on the fact that we have a major problem with male rage and cultural love of violence in this country. Unless and until we can get our collective heads out of our collective asses, talk about it, and do something about it we can expect more of the same. More senseless death. More tragedy. More loss (yes, economic too). More national shame. More chaos in the streets. More fear. More grief. More wasted blood. More. More. More.