Shooter, Wade Page, was Army vet, white supremacist

[JDPriestly]

85. The killers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan are politically motivated.

They are not as sexually motivated as ours. The killers in those other countries are trained to make the bombs and place them as a part of their political and terrorist activities. Bombs are strategically a better choice because they do not put the killer at such great, immediate risk. A bomber can escape from the area in which the killing takes place before the bomb goes off.

Although they share the same basic problem with failure to perform in their society, failure to win, as these assassins do.

The random shooters in this country may be part of a movement, but are not so well organized, and their motivation is to find some sort of expression of power -- a sort of sexual expression for many of them.

Dare I suggest that the gun-obsessed in our country may well be sexually abnormal or sexually frustrated depending on their circumstances? Could it be that sexual repression or even without sexual repression, that sexual obsession makes people violent? It may well be one factor.

And by sex, I am not referring just to the physical act of sex. I mean the word in a broader sense which reaches to how at ease a person is with other people, whether, for example, a man feels a need to "prove himself as a man" in his relationships with men and women, whether a man needs to feel that he is respected, a leader, unusually strong, etc., whether a person has fulfilling relationships with others in which they don't have to be "el supremo," number one all the time. A person who feels a great lack in those areas has the signs of a sense of sexual inadequacy, social inadequacy as I am using the terms.

The people who do these shootings are confused, and very often, it is because they feel that they are supposed to have "succeeded" when they did not. In other words, they feel they should have performed to a higher standard socially or professionally and could not.

Maybe these shootings are a natural reaction to our national obsession with competition and the feelings of inadequacy on the parts of the 99.9% of us who don't "win" at least who don't win very often.

That is a lot of what is behind the whole white supremacy movement. You see very few really successful, outstanding individuals attracted to that sort of nonsense. And the few people recognized as outstanding by the rest of us are people who for one thing or another don't really feel that they have succeeded.

Dick Cheney is a prime example. An overeater to the point of ruining his health. A draft dodger -- several times -- who is obsessed with the military. He sought power for the sake of power. He has some friends, but is not a person you would like when you first met him. Dick Cheney is very much about being the most powerful man in the room -- an obsession. So, of course, he loves hunting and wars in which the bodies of others are at risk but not his own.