That's the point. You get to see how they think to understand why they do the things they do. That's why a lot of academics and criminologist are so dismayed when these people kill themselves and can't be interviewed.
Oh I know it is important to interview them and study them, but I don't think they really know what is wrong with them. It is a very interesting topic though, IMO.
I toldja --- it's a masculinity thing. You notice they're always male, right? It's all about power.
When you're perched in a safe (for now) place where you can make people dance and scream and bleed and run for cover in terror by remote control --- that's power. That's also why the firearm is the weapon of choice. If it were simply about murder, any method would do. Guns return the sensory input they seek, which is the blood and the screams and the palpable fear.
If they couldn't watch that and didn't have that sensory feedback, there would be no point.
I don't really see how being a psychotic sadist is related to masculinity. That is not how I define the word masculinity anyways.
It isn't.
Power is. That's the key word here. It's why you see so many of these guys who are disgruntled ex-employees, or they've gone bankrupt, or their family fell apart, something took away their perception of
power. And once that obsession is desperate enough, strafing helpless people from a distance, gets that power back and feeds that fix, however temporarily. It's a
rush.
If you can stomach it watch the video of Harris and Klebold at Columbine. You can see and hear that rush as they whoop with their own adrenaline. They too were outcasts IIRC. Again --- lost power, regained for the moment. They're high on it.
That's also why the victims are random. Because it doesn't matter who they are or what their stories are; what matters is that there are plenty of targets and they're all vulnerable.