Why Can't They Just Kill Themselves Instead?

Today some gun nut shot up the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., shooting a security guard in the back before being downed by two other guards. The shooter, James von Brunn, is in the hospital, and I can't help but hope enough that he lives long enough to go to jail for the rest of his life.

James von Brunn graduated from Washington University in St. Louis, according to his own autobiography (link available here, for the moment). He played football and was president of SAE.
EDIT: Biography has been shortened on AskArt, but NPR has a Cliffs Notes version on their website.

After college, he served in the Navy, got married, had a kid, got divorced because his wife couldn't put up with his wacko-isms anymore, was in marketing, got into a bar fight, served time in jail, got married again, got divorced again, moved to Maryland, and became a painter.

According to The New York Daily News, he's also a "birther" - someone who questions whether President Obama was actually born in the US (for the record, he was, or that birth announcement from the Honolulu Advertiser is part of one crazy consipracy theory). Of course, it's not surprising he'd be a conspiracy theorist; he writes crazy-ass books, too!

His latest loony tunes book is advertised on his website, HolyWesternEmpire.com, where he purports to believe that a few million Jewish folks are, apparently, going to rise up and kill the gentiles. A statistical improbability, to be sure.

His autobiography reads like a schizophrenic wrote it, which isn't that surprising given the content. He's a paranoid racist blaming Jews and African-Americans for his problems.

Why did he have to kill someone? Can't people like this just chew on some buckshot and save the rest of us the time? Honestly. If you kill yourself and meet God and nobody who's not a white Christian was there, huzzah, you were right. If you meet Ghandi and Jesus and Oskar Schindler and Golda Meir, well....don't say I didn't tell you so.

Stuff like this really bothers me. And it's not a proud day for my alma mater, that's for sure.

EDIT: Washington University has confirmed that Von Brunn was an alumnus with a Bachelor of Science in Journalism.