a reply to:
yuppa
I said nothing about excuses.
Understanding what psychological conditions are necessary in order to produce a murder like this, will be instrumental in keeping people likely to
commit this sort of crime, under close observation, in an institution or otherwise. This will have the twin benefits of keeping dangerously unbalanced
persons off the street and under watch, which they ought to be, and also have the effect of preventing this sort of thing being a regular occurrence.
This is not a situation where a gang was involved, or where financial incentives played a part in the decision making process. There are countless
murders which HAVE involved incentives beyond casual disregard and even antipathy for life. Gangsters offing family members for a greater cut of
proceeds from gang activity, people killing to get further up the command chain, people wiping out other gangsters and their soldiers to gain respect
amongst their own... while these sorts of murder are callous and horrid, just as is virtually any murder, the murder of ones grandparents, absent any
incentive other than the opportunity to kill itself, is bloody rare, and more alarming by far if only because it is such a poorly understood type of
crime.
I am not saying that the perpetrators were not responsible for their actions, because for all I know, they may have been psychopaths. Its worth
mentioning that psychopaths are NOT insane in the traditional sense. A person who is not sane, does not understand the difference between right and
wrong, does not understand consequence, does not understand causality some of the time either. The connection between action and reaction, for them is
very different than it is for you and I. However, a psychopath who kills, knows PRECISELY the difference between right and wrong, but simply does not
care which it is they do at any given moment. They do precisely what they like, no matter whether it is acceptable or not.
However, knowing which was going on in this instance, will help prevent this sort of crime in the future, because greater knowledge being spread
about the sort of behaviour which might have lead up to this, greater information being widely available about how to get a young person into programs
to assess their mental state, and the like, will mean that fewer people are prone to become victims in a circumstance like this one, which I would
have thought you could get behind.