Jared Lee Loughner is, according to early reports, likely the killer of six or seven people in Arizona, including a member of congress and a federal judge. This horrifying shooting rampage took only a couple of minutes, but resulted in traumatizing loss of life.
In such cases, we often ask, what makes this person tick? There is no simple answer, and psychologists will be mulling over the question for years to come. But we have at least one partial answer in the killer's own words. He listed some of his favorite books. He was obsessed by political and social concerns, and read, and re-read, The Communist Manifesto many times.
In addition, he listed Animal Farm and Brave New World as some of his favorites.
To what extent he properly understood what he read, we do not know. But these texts were the raw material out of which he constructed whatever twisted justification he used to explain his murderous intent.
