The Virginia Tech killer’s inspiration for leaving behind the package with a multimedia manifesto and 23 video clips seems to be middle eastern suicide videos. According to NBC he railed against Christianity and wealth.

Among the materials are 23 QuickTime video files showing Cho talking directly to the camera, Capus said. He does not name anyone specifically, but he mentions “hedonism” and Christianity, and he talks at length about his hatred of the wealthy.

“You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today,” Cho says. “But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off.”

The production of the videos is uneven, with Cho’s voice so soft that at times it is hard to understand him. But they indicate that Cho had worked on the package for some time, because he not only “took the time to record the videos, but he also broke them down into snippets” that were embedded paragraph by paragraph into the main document, Capus said.

Chilling photographs
The package also includes 29 photographs. Cho looks like a normal, smiling college student in only the first two. In the rest, he presents a stern face; in 11, he aims handguns at the camera that are “consistent with what we’ve heard about the guns in this incident,” Capus said.

Other photographs show Cho holding a knife, and some show hollow-point bullets lined up on a table.

Sick. Just sick.

I cannot imagine how devastated the families of those who were killed and injured must be.

It’s unbelievably sad.

It’s amazing how crazed killers seem to slip through the cracks of justice and sanity. They always seem to turn up in unsecured places, like colleges, schools and offices, where there are no defenses, to do their killing.

And now, some rational thoughts by Mark Steyn.

Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

UPDATE:

Sissy Willis has the last word.

Like our fellow citizens who insist on building their homes on flood plains, only to see them swept away during periodic torrential rains like we had here in New England earlier this week, those who blame arms and not human nature for what happened at Blacksburg are deaf and dumb to the lessons of history and natural history.