I think what separates normal people from shooters, at least just in this context, is the people who have gone off shooting people like this within the last decade were all legitimately insane. The problem with insane people is that they spend almost every moment of their lives preparing for a point where their mind literally stops working like it's supposed to and they finally reach a point where they just can't handle it anymore. It's not quite the same as ending your own life, though. I'll refrain from talking about instances where it is, in this post, for the sake of keeping things clean.
There's all this bad talk, especially in the media, about these shooters and would-be shooters having some kind of mental thing, going on - at least in some cases. The fact of the matter is, though, the kind of trauma a person can handle (who has the insane gene or whatever you want to call it) has what's basically like a threshold. Once that threshold is breached, the person then "officially" becomes insane. A trained doctor, albeit not just any doctor, but the kind who is used to identifying "insane" people, doesn't make this label "officially" though. He makes it without the use of quotation marks. The other fact of the matter is that people who become insane pretty much already are insane, which is the weird part. Like I said, they spend their whole lives preparing for the event of the onset of insanity, but usually unbeknownst to them.
What kind of person sets themselves up for that level of failure, you ask, though. Well. I'm so glad you asked, because that is EXACTLY THE ENTIRE PREMISE SURROUNDING THREADS LIKE THIS!! Fucking gun violence, dude! What else?! Often the guy in a movie who wields a gun is either a villain or a hero and I think where this mainly took off from wasn't dirty fucking dancing. It was Spaghetti Westerns and whatnot.
You guys wanna support your gun-toting shit fine, but where you guys talk about heroics is where I will always draw a thick ass line. And it's not made of chalk either.