I've been doing a lot of thinking about James Holmes and how he wound up where he did.  The answers I've come up with have been disturbing and very thought provoking.

From his background, James Holmes seems to have been extremely intelligent.  I'll bet he would make most Mensa members look mediocre in the brains department.  This in itself makes him a fairly rare individual.  Being a statistical outlier can be really tough.  By all reports he was also quite polite.  This also helps corroborate the reports that women couldn't stand him.

So, he worked really hard in school, did well and then discovered he couldn't get a job.  One of the obvious paths to postponing having to pay a likely heavy debt load from school was to go back to school, which he did.  PhD programs are tough.  STEM PhD programs are even tougher.  I suspect he was cracking under the strain, particularly with his lack of social and moral support as well as the the continual media message that there was something wrong with him for being an intelligent straight white male.  That message can get very tiresome.

After all of this, he broke.  He killed several people.  While a lot of folks are going on about how many he killed, I glad he didn't kill a lot more.  I can think of a few ways to kill almost everyone on the theater.  A lifetime of reading science fiction, mysteries and spy novels will give a person a few ideas.  James Holmes, is a lot smarter than I am and had a lot better access to both chemical and biological, so he could easily have come up with a dozen of so methods that would be a lot deadlier.  Instead, he chose a method that was deeply personal and in everyone's face.  It wasn't about killing as many people as he could, it was about saying a huge "Fuck you!" to society.  He didn't even make any effort to get away, and he told the police about the boobytrap he had left at his apartment.

It's not hard to deduce some of the logic he probably went through.  He was under financial pressure from student loan debt that is pretty much inescapable.  He had done everything that he had been told to do to have a good life, and it had been thrown in his face.

So why am I writing this in a blog about becoming a minister?  Because James Holmes was one of the people on the fringe.  One of the people our society doesn't believe could ever need help.  Maybe if one person had gone out of their way to help him, to treat him like a real person, maybe this tragedy could have been avoided.  From what I have read about him, I would have liked to have been his friend.  There are a lot of people out on the fringes that no one wants to know about and who don't inspire enough of a sense of pity for the liberal mindset to even care.  These are the people I want to be able to help, not the people who are written up in the newspaper on a regular basis. I pray I can actually do it.