While we try to understand, we should not water down our condemnation of Weise - our assessment of his motive and its root causes should not ignore the fact that he made a free and informed decision to kill innocent people. But the sense of tragedy is made more visceral as we learn more about how a young mind can go so badly off the rails.
Weise grew up on the Red Lake Chippewa reservation, where unemployment hovers near to 60 per cent, four out of every five students live below the poverty line and violent riots recently broke out in protest against the tribal government over civil rights abuse allegations. He was seen as antisocial in school and regularly teased, and started to post on several ultra-right-wing web sites in admiration of Hitler and racial supremacy. The irony therein, that Weise hero-worshipped a man and an ideal that would most likely have sent him to a concentration camp just illustrates the level of disengagement and self-hatred that led to this horror.
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