In short, a psychopath.

From reading his stuff - which I don't recommend, because it's really really crappy - I'd say he doesn't fit any single diagnostic category cleanly, having aspects of several.

But that's true for most mental illnesses. They rarely fit into a single diagnostic category. Insane, though, absolutely by the clinical definition.

There are always going to be broken individuals like this. The sad part here is that there was so much effort being made by family to alert authorities to the problem.

How horrible for those officers who were there in his home, and could have stopped it.

ah, nice reminders. As for the "could have stopped it"... people are complex. Mental health is not now, nor has it ever been, capable of preventing or predicting every danger, not without locking up a lot

of false positives.

I wonder... isn't sexism that teaches men to view women as status symbols? to me, he was beyond sexist.

he had an extreme sense of entitlement and yes, ye thought, like some people I know, that the world owes them.

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if "Atlas Shrugged", "Little Street" and "The Fountainhead" were found in Rodger's belongings.

He took inspiration from the sexism he saw, but from his writing, it doesn't seem like he understood people enough to BE sexist. He said he hated women, and that he blamed them, but he didn't hate them any more

than he hated men. And he never quite grasped that men and women were people.

Bottom line. This is someone who had demonstrated via public media, to his family and to therapists that he was a danger to others. This is not the quiet guy who shocks everyone when he snaps.

Sadly, most folks out there with severe mental illnesses are "only" endangered themselves. They are preyed upon by others, succumb to disease or exposure, die without any media attention. System fails them too

Having read this, I think it goes beyond mere sexism: White guy killer syndrome: Elliot Rodger’s deadly, privileg...

In one of his forum posts on an online community that rails against pick-up artists' bullshit (because they found out pick-up artist crap doesn't work), he had written...

"Women should not have the right to choose who to mate with. That choice should be made for them by civilised men of intelligence."

He was also racist: the first people he killed were his two Asian roommates, whom he described as "repulsive". Ironically, he was half-Asian (from his mother).

And he also said that his failure with women was not only because of all the things misogynists attribute to women, but also because of the Asian blood in him.

Personally, I find myself agreeing with Arthur Chu's article on Daily Beast: Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Ne...

Sexism begets assholes. Serious mental and emotional illness and damage beget killers. White, male, and privilege have nothing to do with this other than as possible triggers that finally pushed him over the

edge. This guy was a very sick and damaged person. That's the story here.

Indeed. The story is basically that he was almost incomprehensibly defective, yet it went untreated; rather than whatever it was that finally sent him to ruin.

Tateru: I don't think he was untreated, he saw psychiatrists. Personality disorders of that magnitude are not curable. Containment is really the only answer. And that is nearly impossible until after the crime

When your circle includes only you, with the rest of the world outside it there is nothing that is going to magically make you into a compassionate, contributing member of society.

A fair point.

The problem really becomes that we, as a compassionate society have decided that we will not proactively "lock up" or eliminate people due to things they could possibly do. The presumption of innocence.

So rather than attempt to protect society by imprisoning or killing any we think "might" go on such a rampage we gamble that they won't and do our best to prevent tragedy while protecting rights.

Statistically it does work, these sorts of things are rare aberrations considering population and density. The problem I see is the inability to limit in any way access to things like firearms for those who

have been identified as being this severely broken.

But even our medical definitions of mental illness are informed more by politics than medicine, so there is definitely some ways to go. (See DSM V)

I don't know all of the details of this case, but Foggy, you make an excellent point. The sorts of things that would have to be done to always prevent such tragedies would be extraordinarily damaging to

society. Our freedoms come with price tags and whether or not this instance was an example of that (I suspect it was), there will always be consequences to having freedoms.

A fine example is that we purchase the freedom to move about in automobiles with a very high toll in lives lost to accidents.

Yes immediately on the heels of the gun control/rights arguments in this case are always a bunch of "our mental health services failed" ones. But people forget that in the past

success meant involuntary treatment, or really the words for it are massive human rights violations against (mostly) innocent people.

Our medical system is broken, even moreso for mental health. There does need to be a balance between the current neglect and the past abuses. But also an understanding that shit is still gonna happen.

I've noticed a severe case of double standards in the discussion of violent crimes. When a poor person, an immigrant, a foreigner or someone from another faith commits a crime, we always say...

...That he's a criminal, a terrorist, a thug, etc. And mental illness never enters the equation.

But when a white, privileged, male (usually Christian) commits a violent crime, we immediately rush to say it was out of mental illness and other causes, even if they are blatantly obvious, are excluded.

Take Anders Behring Breivik: Concerted efforts are made to attribute his crime to madness and not to his violent, far-right extremism. Take Elliot Rodger: We don't want to look at his violent misogyny.

We're trying to say he was unhinged - OK, he was unhinged. But is that all there is to it? Just a madman? His manifesto was a rant about how he'd punish the sluts who denied him the sex he was entitled to.

In other shootings in the US, again - mental illness. Or, they tried to attribute things to the influence of video games and heavy metal.

Timothy McVeigh. People still say he was nuts. No one talks about the elephant in the room, i.e. the fact that he was a far-right terrorist.

I've literally had it with attributing everything to mental illness. It's the easy way out. It's burying our heads in the sand. It's avoiding to talk about the elephant(s) in the room.

And we have huge ones: Misogynist extremism. Racism. Nationalism. Religious fanaticism - remember Dr. Tiller? He was murdered in church by an anti-choice fanatic.

"Oh, the killer was nuts." No, the killers I mentioned were not nuts. They were extremists, plain and simple. Far right extremists (misogyny and the far right go hand-in-hand).

you know it's interesting I've been thinking just the opposite - why should people ever get to use misogyny and bigotry and such to excuse their mentally ill, violent tendencies?

There are lots of people with misogynist and bigotted attitudes out there, and it IS a problem. They are not buying guns and opening fire on strangers. The mental illness comes into the equation when people

act upon impulses that the rest of us manage. Either because they are unable to NOT act or because they are broken, and are unable to comprehend that others are human too.

Saying Rush Limbaugh is crazy because he spews hateful rhetoric and acts like an ass has little basis on fact, it is opinion. Saying someone who commits mass murder based on the same rhetoric is a safe bet.

Doesn't mean he didn't know that it was wrong, or the consequences of his action. Means that his brain was so broken that none of that mattered. And one excuse was as good as any other.

Isn't that the point though? Call it an extremist or a fanatic or a patriot (all terms used at one time or another to indicate mental illness) - but the act of taking extreme measures when less extreme

options are available is a clear sign of mental illness.

AnandaS: No. Playing the mentally ill card automatically removes the option of saying the person is responsible for their action. "I plead insanity, your honour."

AnandaS: Ideology and an outlook on life and people, though, are something you choose, so you are responsible for the way you think and the way you act.

AnandaS: So, if you're a racist and kill people of colour because you think they're inferior and you can kill them "just because", then you're responsible for your actions.

Fogwoman: Rush Limbaugh is not crazy. Neither is any of his ilk (such as Nigel Farage and Nikolaos Michaloliakos). They have a very specific ideology and they promote it consistently.

Fogwoman: The misogynists who (still) haven't bought guns and opened fire would love to do so. They just use other means to harm the ones they see as enemies.

ah, didn't mean to imply I was disagreeing so no need to spam my email.

however I don't think there should be a clear line called like that - racism and misogyny are a species of insane logic, and I think people are absolutely responsible for their actions regardless of the cause

I should break that down a bit, piled too much in one. The insanity defense is an occasional gambit that I don't really agree with - in some places it's a higher standard of "incompetent to stand trial".

Because to some extent nobody's entirely in control of their own actions, but that doesn't change the fact that someone did (or didn't) do the crime. Anyway, what I was thinking before is

that too many evidences of violence get passed by because they're all "oh that's misogyny or racism, everyone's got that condition." But I do agree the double standard (white guys get to mitigate vs. everyone

else because of racism and misogyny in the system) is the worst of the lot.

indeed. and we finally need to sit down and clean up our act.

Fogwoman: This is an example of what I was talking about in my plurk the other day.