Liberals love to find conservative connections to despicable acts of violence. The Aurora, Colorado, shooting is no exception. But going back through the background of mass murderers, I’ve come up with a common denominator – they were all government educated.

The 1999 Columbine shooters were products of the Colorado Public (government) schools system. The pair killed 13 people and injured 24 others. Their worldview was fundamentally Darwinian. “In his journal, [Eric] Harris mentioned his admiration of what he imagined to be natural selection, and wrote that he would like to put everyone in a super Doom game and see to it that the weak die and the strong live.”

The Rocky Mountain News reported Harris and Dylan justified their actions based on Darwinian Natural Selection. Harris was wearing “a white T-shirt with the inscription ‘Natural Selection’ on its front.” It was based on a video game of the same name. “The game’s World Wide Web site says it encompasses a ‘realm where anything can happen,’ a place for the ‘bravest of the brave and the fiercest of the fierce. . . . It’s a place where survival of the fittest takes a very literal meaning. . . .  It’s the natural way, it’s Natural Selection.”

Where did they learn about Natural Selection? In government schools. It’s not just in the United States. Finland had its own mini-Columbine when

“at least seven people were killed when a teenaged gunman opened fire at a school in southern Finland on November 7, 2007 hours after a video was posted on YouTube predicting a massacre there. . . . The YouTube video, entitled ‘Jokela High School Massacre — 11/7/2007,’ was posted by a user called ‘Sturmgeist89.’ ‘I am prepared to fight and die for my cause,’ read a posting by a user of the same name. ‘I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.’” The shooter described himself as “a social Darwinist.”1

The Virginia Tech massacre was a school shooting that took place on April 16, 2007, on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, a governmetn school steeped in Darwinian science. Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others. Cho “railed against his parents’ strong Christian faith.”2

James Holmes is the product of government education. He had a federal grant to study neuroscience at the University of Colorado. Neuroscience is steeped in evolutionary biology and is by definition wholly materialistic:

When materialist causes become both necessary and sufficient to explain all of human thought then parsimony dictates that references to a soul or other supernatural entities can be tossed out.

Given the foundational premise of neuroscience, Holmes did nothing more than kill evolved soulless biological units – bags of meat and bones with electricity coursing through them.

A September 13, 2008 Newsweek article shows that the science of neuroscience is that our actions are the result of “an array of mindlessness,” the reaction of “mechanical or chemical bits.”

“Today neuroscientists are finding abundant evidence of an idea that even Freud played with more than 100 years ago, that separating mind from brain makes no sense. Nobel Prize-winning psychiatrist-neuroscientist Eric Kandel stated it directly in a watershed paper published in 1998: ‘All mental processes, even the most complex psychological processes, derive from operations of the brain.’

“Neuroscientists consider it settled that the mind arises from the cooperation of billions of interconnected cells that, individually, are no smarter than amoebae. But it’s a shocking idea to some that the human mind could arise out of such an array of mindlessness. Many express amazement that emotions, pain, sexual feelings or religious belief could be a product of brain function. They are put off by the notion that such rich experiences could be reduced to mechanical or chemical bits. Or they worry that scientific explanations may seduce people into a kind of moral laziness that provides a ready excuse for any human failing: ‘My brain made me do it.’”

If I were James Holmes, I would find myself a good lawyer and the best neuroscientist that money could buy and argue that I was taught in government schools that “My evolved brain made me do it.”

1. David Williams, “Eight Shot dead including principal in school massacre predicted in YouTube video,” Daily Mail online (November 7, 2007). [↩]
2. Toby Harnden, “The Roommate’s Story,” The Daily Telegraph (London) (April 19, 2007). [↩]