The coward formally known as David Katz.
Let's get serious for a second. I want to express my sincerest condolences for the lives recently lost at a Madden NFL video game tournament in Florida. The soft, Twinkie filling, spineless, jellyfish of a man, David Katz, took it upon himself to kill those whom he viewed as adversaries in real life, because of a situation that occurred 2 years prior. It's a despicable, horrible and sad act that speaks volumes about the current social climate.
I'll be honest that I'm not with all this nonsense saying he was a racist, or that anything was racially motivated. I'm not gonna blame his very weak mind or his obviously anti-social behavior. Not his schooling, although I would not doubt that he was the object of some type of bullying. I won't even blame guns or the right to have them.
But what I will blame are those that were trusted to raise this person into a man. The people that professed to love him. Those that should have shown him how to behave like a human being instead of a soulless game character with a bent for revenge. I blame the parents. (or lack thereof) I put the blame solely on them because something went wrong. Such a heinous act is almost inevitably due to how this man-child grew up. And of course, I blame David Katz, himself.
One thing that America doesn't want to discuss, and instead sweeps under the rug or locks away in dark, moth-ridden, dusty closets is the growing epidemic of absentee fathers. No longer are families expected to grow as one, united in marriage as man and wife, but shown, rather erroneously, that somehow single-motherhood is profound. And effortless. And somehow virtuous. Because, men or disposable, patriarchal monsters that are useless and should be exchanged for more feminine imposters. Boys don't need fathers when they can have mothers.
David Katz, now dead due to a self-inflicted gunshot wound, decided to impose the pain he felt within on as many as he could before erasing himself from this earthly plain. David, I can only speculate, lived in a bubble where he was god-king and unchallenged in Madden World. Summarily, he was not prepared for embarrassment or any real shot to his ego in life. When faced with the latter, most likely he had a mental break. Most sociopaths can't deal with anything that shatters the pristine mirror they've erected for their fragile lives. And since he broke, he wanted to break everything around him.
Reality is hard to deal with as we are often disappointed by what we see. We can't control anything around us, and when faced with the little control we have over ourselves, it all seems so useless. Still, I have faith that things will be set right in my life. The pendulum swings back and forth, between good and bad, and we must expect disappointment. Loss. Pain. And we have to learn how to deal with it and move forward. It's a lifelong lesson.
David Katz didn't have this outlook and found himself thrust into a world he didn't know or expect: one of humiliation and embarrassment and fractured egos. His fragility, as with many mass murders, was a deep wound that had not healed. I am not sure what it is, but mark my words, after some digging, it will come out.
Until then, we can speculate about what it might be. But I am sure about one thing: if we don't address the problem of family and the absence of our fathers from the home, David Katz won't be the last young man to take out his personal frustrations on real-world targets with deadly intent.