Review: Okay, but...
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 17, 2014
If you want to find info on several female rampage killers compiled in one place, and aren't looking for anything really special, this book will do. There are some errors, which include wrong names and dates, so don't consider everything you read to be factual in this book.This is the type of book where someone had an idea of something interesting, then probably spent a lot of time on Wikipedia compiling info (without 100% accuracy) and then strung it together with some basic narrative.At the end, summary thoughts are included, one of which said that part of the problem in society is the overcrowded mental hospitals. I almost laughed out loud when I read that. Most spree killers should have been institutionalized long before they killed anyone since it's usually abundantly clear to people who know them that they are not well. But they are walking the streets, filling office cubicles and classrooms, not because of overcrowding, but because it's nearly impossible to get them committed until *after* they've harmed anyone.Nancy Lanza was *trying* to get her son Adam committed, but couldn't. He was an adult. It would've violated his rights to have him committed. The Columbine killers had a website with a list of people they said they were going to kill. The Sheriff's office knew about it long before they killed anyone. I wrote a brief study of school shooters (which includes more interesting insight into the girl who said she didn't like Mondays) to dispel the notion that video games had anything to do with their massacres and one of the things I learned was that they're almost always mentally ill with criminal histories. They were walking time-bombs just waiting to go off. And the people who knew them and how potentially dangerous they were just waited until they did. Then they wrung their hands and said, "We did everything we could!"But our laws prevented them from doing more, like putting them away. You could walk around for six months wearing a shirt that says, "I'm going to kill 20 people on July 4th" and no one will do anything but look at your strange.Anyway, like I said, this book serves a purpose, but it's not great, or entirely accurate.(If you'd like a quick overview on the history and causes of school shootings, look for Fun & Games & Mass Murder.)