What makes a man start fires?

Better gear up for at least three months worth of hand-wringing and finger-pointing, because this latest teenage atrocity is bound to throw pundits into a self-satisfied bluster. It seemed like school massacres were out of fashion, like Marilyn Manson or the Spice Girls, but there's one thing that the human race will never conquer and that's simple madness. What can you say about a 17 year old who kills his own grandparents and figures he's got nothing to lose so why not fuck up all those assholes at school too? Was he just nuts? Did he follow a dark path he'll be paying for eternally? Or is he the same as any of us, ready to become a monster whenever one of our synapses misfires or the pesticides in our breakfast cereal react badly with our allergy medicine?

At what point does evil, the conscious choice of wrong over right, cross over into insanity, a human being overcome by brain chemistry and frustration? Too often I fear we're all just slippery, stinking bags of chemicals at the mercy of biology without the sentient souls we like to pretend we have. Will God have mercy on a man who hears voices and does what they tell him? Will Jeffery Weise go to hell for his actions? No one yet understands exactly what triggered this latest Columbine, so I'm not basing this rambling ramble on anything other than my own obsession with the nature of our thoughts and decisions. It would be nice to believe that each man has the choice to either create or destroy, to strive for good or succumb to evil, but it gets harder to swallow with every year I live.