Amoklauf in Alburquerque

This time the shooter is believed to have had a beef with an erstwhile significant other who worked in the office building -- something to do with domestic violence, according to this report. So did he not know where the woman lived? Could he not ambush her in the parking lot? Apparently not. Instead, this man's personal issues became a pretext for mass murder: five dead, four wounded, himself a suicide. The early reports were unclear as to whether the woman who was his enemy was among the casualties.

So how did this person go from a perhaps comprehensible compulsion to kill a particular person to that monstrous sense of entitlement that empowered him to leave his mark on our world in the form of a bloody stain? Will it come out that he thought that the woman's co-workers poisoned her mind against him? Or did some obscene ego decide that, this way, he would be more than a mere murdering male? Did the gun in his hand convert his pathetic grudge into a protest against society and his murderous impulse into some mockery of martyrdom to compel our attention? Those convinced of the gun's innocence will say the man was sick, and I'll buy that to an extent. But the gun may well have been a symptom of his sickness, and the more certain thing is that, just as the jihadist brute is not a suicide bomber without his bomb, there are no amoklaufs in America without guns.

Update: the local authorities have revised the body count downward. They now state that the gunman killed only two people beside himself, and they're still uncertain of the status of the person he presumably actually meant to kill.