My heart goes out to the innocent victims who were murdered by a privileged white kind who couldn’t get a girl to sleep with him.

A parent of one of the victims blamed the murder of his son on guns and the NRA. The guns didn’t kill anybody. The person using the gun did. Here it is as succinct as an explanation you can get, delivered by the character Shane in the 1953 film of the same name:

“A gun is a tool, Marian; no better or no worse than any other tool: an axe, a shovel or anything. A gun is as good or as bad as the man using it. Remember that.”

We’ve learned that six people were not murdered with a gun. A new report contends that Elliot Rodger “is believed to have used a machete and hammer to slaughter his first three victims in an apartment he planned to turn into a personal torture and killing chamber.”

None of this is any comfort to the parents whose children were murdered. But blaming the NRA and guns is not the solution.

Elliot Rodger had a long history of mental and emotional problems. “Simon Astaire, a family friend, said [the Rodger’s son] had been seeing therapists since the age of eight, including virtually ‘every day’ while at high school.” Maybe a stable home life might have helped. Elliott’s parents are divorced. It’s possible that Elliott’s father’s nude photography hobby was a contributing factor to his son’s warped view of women.

There were certainly warning signs of trouble. “Police visited him . . . after being alerted by his mother to disturbing videos on YouTube. But officers had not watched the videos and did not search the apartment.” How could they? They did not have probable cause. The parents could have checked up on in. I’m sure they are second guessing themselves at this very moment.

There are other factors that can feed someone who has mental and relational issues. There are numerous triggers for someone like Elliot. Family life is an important factor. Preoccupation with sex is another. It’s a story when a person does NOT have sex before marriage. It’s almost obligatory that young people have numerous sex partners.  It’s a rite of passage.

What isn’t sold with sex today? There’s no escaping its distortions.

“Everybody’s doing it but me; therefore, something must be wrong with me. I’ll fix that.” What is right or wrong anymore? Who can say?

There’s another aspect to this story that liberals do not want to consider since they do not believe it can be mentioned as a factor: culture.

Mike Adams makes some good points about how moral relativism and the celebration of killing can be a witch’s brew for some people. There’s not just one thing that leads someone to snap:

“Let’s look at the role of the media in celebrating the death of young people and desensitizing us all to death through Hollywood film and television shows. Rodger, in particular, was reportedly the son of an Assistant Director who worked on the Hunger Games films: a series that depicts young people killing each other as a survival sport in a dystopian police state society.

“That movie, as important as the message is for resistance against government tyranny and Orwellian oppression, nevertheless desensitizes us against acts of violence against children. But this is just the beginning of a system of cultural programming that produces psychopathic killers like Elliott Rodger.

“There are also seemingly countless television shows these days that openly celebrate death and murder. The show Dexter, for example, celebrates the life of a ‘revenge killer’ who meticulously plans his murders, but who only murders ‘people who deserve it’ such as other killers, rapists, etc.

“In fact, the cold, calculated strategy of Rodger eerily resembles that of the star in the Dexter television series. As Rodgers explains in his own manifesto:

‘The first people I would have to kill are my two housemates, to secure the entire apartment for myself as my personal torture and killing chamber… After that, I will start luring people into my apartment, knock them out with a hammer, and slit their throats. I will torture some of the good looking people before I kill them, assuming that the good looking ones had the best sex lives.’

“In other words, Rodger sees himself playing the morally justified role of killing women who deserve to be killed, in his own mind. Although he is clearly twisted and demented at some level, TV shows like Dexter drive home the message that ‘it’s okay to kill people if they deserve it.’”

In the end, Elliot Rodger is responsible for his crimes, but we can’t discount the major worldview shift we’re seeing in our time as a factor in distorting his perception of reality. We’re going to see more of this type of behavior.