How many shooting sprees have been carried out by "disturbed" persons in recent years ?

All of them. No one in his right mind by our standards will ever go on a shooting spree. They are all crazy and that is that. Our peculiar society always wants a reason and since unreasonable acts by unreasonable people cannot be explained to our satisfaction we look for excuses. Disturbed, video games, rough childhood, bad parents, agent orange, Gun laws, anything besides pointing the finger at a killer and just calling him a killer.

I am not quite following your thinking.

Would you rather that the perpetrator were sane?

I am sure that is not what you mean.

Yes all these people do have mental health issues and that they managed to slip through the cracks with such simplicity needs to be looked at; even in a perfect world I am afraid that that is going to happen sometimes.

What worries me most is that they all use guns.

I am sorry, but in other countries where guns aren't readily available we may have the odd knife rampage-which whilst appalling generally does not have the high casualty rate I see in the USA- and people do not get in a car and aim it at the largest group of people they can find the better to kill as many as possible.

This tends to suggest that something is desperately wrong with the gun culture in the USA.

Mental problems are really main reasons. However, what triggered those mental problems are other questions.

Perhaps, Alexis rightly called it as Elf-shot.

http://news.yahoo.com/navy-contractor-left-cryptic...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elf#Elf_shot

Everyone in the world should train themselves with DBT

http://www.dbtselfhelp.com/

This can help them to face extreme situation.

I agree with your point of view.Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in Norway and I remember the struggle to argue he was mad. To the BBC and most other commentators it was inconceivable that such violence could be anything but an example of insanity. Breivik was having none of it and actually proved himself sane in the face of this great consensus.

He was a fanatic as are these Muslim fanatics. There is no doubt in my mind that they are very nasty and unreasonable people but not lunatics. They know what they are doing. We are to fast to excuse men of blood with psychobabble.People seem more comfortable with random insanity than fanatical ideology as a cause of massacres.

All of them.