From a new piece by Peter Wood:

When radical evil really manifests itself, it is more often in the midst of everyday life. This week it was in a college dormitory and a lecture hall. In my book on anger, I declared that I would set aside one subject — the link between anger and violence — because that is the only aspect of anger that usually gets serious attention. I wanted to examine anger in its own right to see if it has other qualities that had been overlooked. What I found was “new anger,” a self-justifying, narcissistic rage that our society once regarded as akin to madness, but now extols as self-empowerment and authenticity. What happens when the new anger goes beyond snarling epithets in the blogosphere or the tennis court? Perhaps a gunman seeks his authenticity with a couple of handguns and extra clips of ammunition. Schools and colleges offer innocent and defenseless victims to maximize what the trendy theorists in the humanities like to call the sense of “transgression.” And the college campus is also the place of hidden hierarchies and exclusions that can be banished in an instant with a spray of bullets. Mass murder is about nothing if not self-empowerment, and what better venue for the ultimate exercise in self-empowerment than the institution that preaches it night and day?