Another mass killer prepares for mayhem under the radar

A high school. A university cam- pus. An Army base. A shopping mall. And now a theater.

What they have in common is their use by disturbed, angry and well-armed killers who went to those places and opened fire on innocent people. Most of the shooters were loners. Some people will argue that they were mentally ill; others will see them as simply evil.

But whatever the mental state or motivations, these spree killers were unable to directly confront what they found challenging in life. They instead armed themselves and turned their homicidal rage on people they could be reasonably sure would be unable to offer resistance.

And it is that element of willfulness — their ability to plan for wreaking maximum havoc on the innocent at a minimal risk to themselves that makes these murders contemptible.

And while we tend to think of killers as products of America, every continent has suffered at the hands of mass murders. Indeed, the worst of these killers in modern times is Anders Behring Breivik, who went on a shooting spree at a summers camp in Norway a year ago Sunday, killing 77 people, most of them teenagers.

The latest alleged killer to dominate the day’s headlines is James Holmes. Witnesses say he appeared during the showing of the latest Batman film, “Dark Knight,” at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.

This wasn’t spontaneous

He was well-prepared, armed with a semiautomatic rifle, a pistol and a shotgun. He was dressed in black and protected with body armor and a helmet. He disoriented the crowd with a smoke bomb before opening fire.

The toll at this writing is 12 people dead and 59 injured.

But James Holmes is unscathed. When confronted by police who were responding to frantic cellphone calls to 911, Holmes surrendered.

His willingness to kill innocent strangers, it seems, was exceeded only by his desire for self-preservation at the end of the night.

People who know him are already painting a sympathetic portrait of an intelligent, quiet young man who, until recently, excelled in academics. There will be talk of something having “snapped.”

But the unanswered question is likely to be why no one recognized the snapping, at least in recent weeks or months as he went about the task of assembling a small arsenal, of building bombs with which to booby trap his apartment building and of buying military- or SWAT-grade body armor.

Like so many times before — at Columbine, Virginia Tech and Fort Hood, to name just a few — there were signs that people closest to Holmes apparently missed.

Perhaps they just wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt; they couldn’t bring themselves to think the worst of him.

And so he went about his preparations unimpeded — and committed one of the worst crimes imaginable.