Clearly these events are very disturbing for everyone involved, mainly because they lack any meaning and occur totally out of character to the most unlikely people. A normally rational individual with a great record loses the plot and goes berserk - it is difficult not to feel both alarmed, but also a sense of deep sadness for the man involved and his family. I do, however, disagree with the view that all bad behaviour is essentially related to insanity in some form or other. If you do not have a factor in for pure badness then you are missing the point - that, incidentally, is not what I am suggesting here.
I am just concerned that this case is being compared to Sgt Bales in Afghanistan or someone who decides to strap a pile of explosives to himself, walk into a restaurant full of random strangers and blow himself up whilst believing all along he is doing a good thing. These are not comparable events and we should be careful in drawing comparisons.
I am a Brit and we do not have the same liberal-conservative debate being fought out at every available opportunity here. Because the Captain involved was a professing Christian and did not vote for Barack Obama does not make him a 'wacko', any more than him being a Muslim makes him a terrorist or being a liberal makes him a child-killing pervert. These characterisations are very common in the States, but not so much so here in Europe.
For what it is worth, there are people who get up in the morning and rationally decide to kill people - there are bad people out there who want to do terrible things. If your only point of reference is to remove personal responsibility for bad behaviour and explain it in terms of environment or mental illness you can never truly grasp the situation. To see murder in terms of bi-polar disorder or that someone must have trod on his hamster when he was six, then you will never truly understand human nature. Evil does exist and people do some truly terrible things by choice and with full sanity. Just read some history books and find out what people did in Auschwitz and Belsen simply because they could - it is truly horrific. Therefore, there is a balance here - by all means recognise the existence of mental illness, but we must also see that bad people do exist and do terrible things by choice. I am open to any explanation of this case - on the surface of things it seems like a clear case of mental illness that will go on to cause massive heartbreak to the individual, his company and his family.