not empathy, nor am i all that sympathetic to his situation in general. his attitude towards women and minorities is appalling, especially when you consider the field he was trying to break into.

but he seemed very lonely and misanthropic, and i know how one gets to that point from personal experience. you can get to a dark place very quickly, and this is only made worse if the individual deals with a mental illness. you can develop some really cruel and fucked up beliefs if you're stuck in your own mental prison like that. if he does indeed have a mental illness (and it's probably going to turn out to be something incredibly stigmatized, which i can also relate to), i'm sure he didn't receive proper intervention for it. potentially could explain a lot of his antisocial behaviors and affect, though that's speculative on my part.

however, that doesn't give you license to take four innocent lives away. four people that objectively did nothing to him, even if he was deluded enough to think otherwise. four people that he staked out for weeks. he had more than enough time to seek help and more than enough time to have second thoughts about what he planned to do. he could have made other choices that didn't hurt himself or anyone else. i don't think there's anything that even marginally excuses what he did. not any mental illness, not bullying, not social isolation, not rejection from women, absolutely nothing.