Was it the gunman's upbringing, society's misogynistic expectations of sexual fulfilment that led to the shooting, or was it simply his history of mental illness combined with easy access to high powered guns?

Rob Cover's complete failure to mention that Rodger was a fruitcake, and using him as an example of misguided male youth indicates to me that this article is more about pushing Rob's ideological agenda than reality.

Since the liberalisation of entertainment media laws in the early seventies, our entertainment media has become extremely violent. Violent movies are specifically engineered to appeal to young males who harbour feelings of inadequacy. The movies usually involve a villain doing something dastardly to the hero or his family, whereupon then hero spends the rest of the movie hunting down and killing his tormentors.

The constant message, is that Real Men are violent men. Real Men kill the people who are hurting them without remorse or pity. Whereas most of us can watch such a movie, where the usual legal restrictions on killing and violence are reversed, as a form of entertainment, some people use these movies as scripts for their own behaviour.

If we can understand that the images and messages presented to people in the form of tobacco advertising can influence millions of perfectly normal people to take up a filthy habit which is both addictive and ruinous to health, on the basis that it is a manly or fashionable thing to do, then it should not be hard to figure out that movies which constantly extol murderous revenge as a virtue can do the same thing, at least to people with a shaky grip on reality.

FBI profilers who have examined the rooms of young mass murderers are always struck by the similarity of the rooms. In every offenders rooms are the violent movies, violent posters on walls, violent computer games, and the pop music with lyrics extolling the virtues of misogyny, violence, and the virtues of being criminal street gang member.

The culture of every nation once was used to teach the young about the values, attitudes, and behaviours expected of them to conform to community expectations. But this worthy ideal has been corrupted by an industry which has found that entertainment which teaches the young to be violent criminals and murderers has a positive effect on their industries quarterly balance sheets.

If you are not having sex from the day you are born to the day you die in this modern age there must be something wrong with you, the magazines, TV, and media shout it from the rooftops, get at it, in your old age grab a tube of KY, get out your dildo's and any thing else if the old fellow stays flacid, don' worry, just as long as you are at it, it is no wonder this particular young guy thought he was missing out of dipping his wick twenty four hours a day, when every one else was screaming in exstacy more, more, don't stop, if he had thought about it, having a tug may have released the frustrations that he was imagining about himself missing out on sexual exstacy, sometimes in my old age when I look at the young, I would sooner have a tug.

Why is it that when an event like this occurs that people accept the gunman’s interpretation of his actions to be perfectly logical and reasonable? This then becomes fire for pushing their own ideological agenda.

Surely this was a very unstable young man. No one goes on a shooting rampage and then takes his own life because it is the logical and reasonable thing to do. They do it because they have lost all capacity to think rationally and clearly. They have lost touch with everything we claim to be normal behaviour and yet claims come from all manner of experts that it is all about sex, entitlement or misogyny. “Oh it must be about these things because he said so in a note and he is obviously the best one to understand his own behaviour”.

Academics and commentators who commence arguments and try to draw conclusions that mirror their own positions based on the suicide note of anyone show us not their understanding of human behaviour but their complete ignorance of it. Suicide is never a logical behaviour since the instinct to survive is embedded so deeply in us.

We do not need events like this to tell us that misogyny is wrong or that entitlement is not a value that we all share. Those things have their own valid arguments. It is irrelevant what he thought his motives were – it does nothing to help understand his particular illness. Using this type of tragedy to bolster some point of view about sex, misogyny or entitlement only shows up how poorly constructed some of the arguments for those things are.

Shadow minister got it right "...Was it the gunman's upbringing, society's misogynistic expectations of sexual fulfilment that led to the shooting, or was it simply his history of mental illness combined with easy access to high powered guns?"

It was absolutely his fatal mixture of mental illness and access to guns that led to this tragedy. Even his own parents tried to warn the police about his behaviour.

If every bloke or girl who was ever 'shunned' or 'spurned' by someone of the opposite sex ran out and killed someone, we wouldn't have many left in the world.

If only Governments would take mental illness seriously and really get behind that part of the health system financially, we would be better off.

Luckily, these sort of mass killings don't happen often in Australia, because we have reasonable gun laws.
I feel sorry for law-abiding non-gun toting citizens in America, and other trigger happy countries, when they have to deal regularly with these atrocities.

Australia once had almost non existent gun laws and one of the world's lowest homicide rates. In NSW, the legal age for firearm ownership was 16 and firearm licences were unheard of. Firearms could be purchased at suburban hairdressers, and ammunition at petrol stations and corner stores. Schoolboys in cadet uniform could be seen carrying Lee Enfield military rifles on buses and trains and nobody batted an eye. We lived in an age where kids did not go on killing sprees and kill kids. Even today, those areas of Australia which have the highest concentrations of firearm ownership are the rural areas, which have the lowest crime rates. Some country towns have never had an armed robbery in their entire history.

What we are witnessing today are new and growing phenomenon's. The fastest growing crime statistic in the USA is juvenile gang killings. Once rare serial killing incidents are increasing. Once rare Spree killers and mass murderer incidents are increasing. If the behaviour of your young people is going off the rails, it is pertinent to look at that part of your society which has changed, not to continually blame firearms, which were always present.

People are not born with moral values. The values which direct our behaviours are inculcated into us as children and youth's by our culture, and the role models that our culture provides. Culture's can be violent or non violent. The reason why Mexico has a homicide rate 15 times Australia's, is because Mexico's culture endorses violence as a masculine way of solving personnel problems, while Australia does not. But that is changing. Today's on screen role models have only one characteristic, the ability to beat the ever lovin' shiit out of anybody who crosses them.

Firearm laws are a litmus paper test of how violent your society is becoming. Violent societies usually have very strict firearm laws which do little to prevent homicides. Non violent societies usually have lax firearm laws because the primary moderator of violent behaviour is the generally agreed upon moral value that using violence to solve personnel problems is reprehensible.