The shooter from his MySpace page.


Hindsight is a funny thing. If we had the benefit of hindsight before things happened, a lot of bad stuff would never happen. Of course, sometimes we have the benefit of foresight and still manage to screw things up. Take the case of the guy who went on the shooting spree here in our city.

What is apparent is that the shooter, David Nickolas Delich is a very sick guy. He is profoundly mentally ill and this isn't a recent revelation. He's been this way a long time.

He was mentally ill when he threated friends, neighbors and strangers. He was mentally ill as he assembled his arsenal of weapons. He was mentally ill when he threated to kill a lot of policeman.

Lots of people had reason to believe that Delich was dangerously deranged and capable of violence. Some of the signs were very obvious and some were more subtle, but they were clear enough. In the context of what happened, a bunch of people are kicking themselves in the behind for not stopping this character before he killed Officer Erik Hite. There will be serious fallout over how everyone missed or ignored the signs.

By all accounts, friends and family knew the shooter was getting crazier and crazier. Acquaintances report that he suffered from feeling of persecution, anger and revenge. He reportedly had delusions that he was supernatural in some way, god perhaps. He was angry with the world.

According to the news reports, he posted on his MySpace page that he intended to kill a bunch of cops. On February 22nd he wrote, "Soon, I plan to kill many police officers." I'm pretty sure that a bunch of people saw that. Where's Homeland Security when you need their swell surveillance? Or the FBI or even our own police department?

We now know that he threatened a former girlfriend from high school via email, repeatedly over a long period of time. Her report to the police evidently was not taken seriously. He said in emails that he was going to create a holocaust, that she should paint a target on her head and that he had a surprise for her family that he would deliver in person. He also threatened others that he thought had slighted him from his high school days, in the same way.

The weird part is, that like many of these crazed shooters, he was able to assemble an arsenal. Most of these guys don't get their weapons from master criminals or gun suppliers to the drug cartels, they get them through perfectly legal channels. Only in America can profoundly mentally ill person arm himself to the teeth and no one bothers to intervene.





Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky