Note: This deep dive into the mindset of mass killers originally ran in 2016, we're resurfacing it in light of the recent attack.

Don't tell me the attacks are "inexplicable." Anything can be explained.

It seems like the last year has been an unending parade of unfathomable acts of mass violence, usually by "lone wolf" attackers against a bunch of strangers who never wronged them. Well, I'm not comfortable declaring things unfathomable. I want to fathom everything. It's how I cope. If you don't want to read about these people or think this is glorifying them, I respect your opinion. But me? I want to know. I want to understand.

So I've examined the lives of the mass killers who've made headlines over the last year, and what I've found is that the ensuing narrative in each case was usually either wrong or laughably oversimplified.

Note: I'm intentionally leaving out the Paris attacks of November 2015 and the bombings in Brussels, because those were no mystery -- they were the work of well-organized ISIS cells. I'm also leaving off the guy who shot 17 people in Kansas in April (do you even remember that one?), because he wasn't much of a mystery either -- he was a lifelong criminal who had so much meth and alcohol in his system that he probably had no idea what the fuck he was even doing.

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The rest, well, aren't so simple. Let's take a few minutes to try to understand these fetid shitheads.