Yahoo! News/AP– George Sodini seethed with anger and frustration toward women. He couldn’t understand why they ignored him, despite his best efforts to look nice. He hadn’t had a girlfriend since 1984, hadn’t slept with a woman in 19 years…For months, he also wrote vaguely about using guns to carry out his “exit plan” at his health club, where lots of young women worked out…On Tuesday, Sodini put his plan into action…He went to the sprawling L.A. Fitness Club in this Pittsburgh suburb, turned out the lights on a dance-aerobics class filled with women, and opened fire with three guns, letting loose with a fusillade of at least 36 bullets…He killed three women and wounded nine others before committing suicide.

George Sodini was not unemployed, sick, or even picked on. He was lonely. So what better way to get back at all the girls not banging down his door to get close to him, than to open fire on them? This is scary really, because these types of massacres were generally reserved for business offices and schools. Now you have to worry about going to the gym.

But why the gym? Because that is where the pretty girls are? How much inner torment can you cultivate in a place that you spend only 2 hours a day, 3 or 4 times per week? In school or at work you are forced to endure your environment. It is your livelihood. But if the hot chicks in aerobics class taunt you with their inaccessibility, switch gyms. The fact that this happened in a gym does not bode well for other institutions. We have seen this type of behavior, not just at work, or in schools, but also in some churches and malls. But what is next? Drug stores, movie theatres, parks? Is anywhere safe?

If the disgruntled, or in this case the morbidly lonely, insist on these rampages, why do they have to open fire on the innocent.? If you resent your coworkers, classmates, or aerobics partners so much that you have to kill someone, why not take it out on some local organized crime element? Go out like Charles Bronson. Vigilantism is wrong, but it is better than massacring the blameless.

Maybe the most compelling element of these stories is that the killer almost always commits suicide at the end. It is the ultimate act of cowardice. They refuse to pay the criminal price for their actions. They deny the victims’ families’ answers, and they deny themselves of a chance at redemption. Jail is no place to prosper in repent, but some do find meaning in life there after their vicious acts.

So, next time you get passed over for a raise, start looking for somewhere else to work. Next time your classmates embarrass you in the cafeteria, start eating lunch outside. Or next time some girl on the treadmill rebuffs your advances, move to the Stairmaster. And until you can surround yourself with people who respect you, hold your head high and verbally open fire on the people who sicken you with F-bombs. It feels just as good as firing bullets.

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