"I’d quite like to know, then, how Liviu Librescu—the aeronautical engineer and Holocaust survivor whose only offense seems to have been shielding students and thus reducing the number of corpses Cho produced—did anything to add to the killer's encyclopedic list of grievances."

No you wouldn't. Because even if he had done something to add to the list of grievances, you wouldn't believe it anyway. This is not to say that he did, nor is it to argue that any of the victims 'deserved' to die. That is not argued nor is it implied in the "subtext" of Ames' book either. And by changing the subject from a discussion of why these shootings are happening into whether or not the victims 'had it coming' you willfully miss the point.

You basically admit in your review that the only explanation for these killings is that the shooters are 'insane'. So not only do you not offer an alternative explanation, you're not the slightest bit interested in considering one. You share the unintellectual assumption that most Americans make by just conveniently passing it all off as the doings of psychopaths, and generally something not worth fussing over. If that's the argument, that all of these workplace and school shootings that are so particular and new to America, should be dismissed as isolated acts of insanity, well, then, you might as well just give up. Pat Buchanan's response to the VT shooting was that we have to become much more vigilant, mindful and intolerant of "aberrant" behavior, and just today some high school kid with a "4.2" GPA was arrested for penning an aberrant creative writing essay. I suppose you're all for this sinister movement?

I personally think the root cause of all this violence is the fundamental cruelty and lack of compassion that triumphs in American society. I have a foreign friend who was recently kicked out of an ambulance after confessing to the crime that he didn't have health insurance. He had just been knocked off his bike, robbed and beaten up. Bloodied and bruised, he was denied medical attention on the grounds that none of his injuries were "life threatening". This is but a minor example of course, but how can you justify a society where things like this happen on a routine basis and nothing is ever done about it?

Mark