Some highlights:
- He was hospitalized after graduating HS in 1998 for mental issues.
- He spent six months in the Army and got a mental health discharge
- He had a brief stint as a prison guard that ended when he didn't show up for work
- He was involved with a woman, the relationship is reported to be rocky and abusive (with him being on the delivering end)
- He was on meds but he went off them a couple weeks ago and his behavior went really erratic
- He was a grad student in sociology studying crime
- His profs described him as brilliant
- He was NOT a loner
- Everyone thought he was a nice and stable guy
And:
Emphasis mine.
Quote: On Feb. 9, Kazmierczak walked into a Champaign gun store and picked up two guns — a Remington shotgun and a Glock 9mm handgun. He bought the two other handguns at the same shop — a Hi-Point .380 on Dec. 30 and a Sig Sauer on Aug. 6.
All four guns were bought legally from a federally licensed firearms dealer, said Thomas Ahern, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. At least one criminal background check was performed — Kazmierczak had no criminal record.
Kazmierczak had a state police-issued FOID, a firearms owners identification card, which is required in Illinois to own a gun, authorities said. Such cards are rarely issued to those with recent mental health problems. And since Kazmierczak's stay in the mental health center was more than five years ago, it didn't raise red flags.
We tend to look at these shooting incidents on a case by case basis, but I'm not sure that's right. This happens too often to just be a bunch of isolated incidents. It seems to me that these shootings are a symptom of some larger problem, some sickness in our society. We point our fingers in all the usual places - gun laws, mental health issues, violent video games, etc., but I'm not convinced that the cause is in these things. I have a feeling that there is some sort of deeper corruption. My boyfriend and I were talking about this last night, and we were thinking that maybe part of the problem is the mad rush of consumerism that's taken hold of the country. Everybody's running around buying crap and making money to buy more crap because they believe having crap will make them happy. People get so wrapped up in the value of money that they forget that there is another kind of currency, a kind that is so greatly under-valued in the US that some of you reading this probably rolled your eyes without even stopping to consider what I'm getting at. There's something fundamentally missing in our lives. We let the advertisers define success for us, and they defined it as having stuff, but having stuff isn't very fulfilling. Making things with your hands can be fulfilling. Learning something new can be fulfilling. Serving a community or teaching can be fulfilling. But how valued are service and teaching? How valued is learning? How valued is making things (and I'm covering the gamut, from fields to factory floors to art studios, writing desks and so on)? We like to brag about how little sleep we get and how hard we work and while a strong work ethic made this country strong, that work ethic made us strong because we were producing things with it, not just running around to spend more. There's some sort of quality that life used to have, and still has in other parts of the world, that we don't. That quality is what I call the under-valued currency. And, in general terms, America is poor in that quality and it's ripping people apart.
Anyway, that's my rant. For the record, I'm getting by on the standard currency we're all busting our butts for (it helps that I'm just not into the whole consumer thing - otherwise, on my stipend, I'd be effing miserable), and quite poor in the other kind. I've spent so much of it, the other kind, on grad school. It's been driving me batty. In recent months I've realized why I've been going batty and taken steps to recover some of that quality. Life has been getting better, but it's going to take some time to recover all the soul grad school ate, if I ever do. In the meantime, because I've put the brakes on myself going batty, I am now driving my adviser batty. Better him than me. He's already nuts. A little more nuts won't hurt.