Abigail, Hailey, Kyle, Blake

Ms. Mauk

ENC2135

19 October 2016

UCSB Shooting: Revenge and College Students

            Elliot Rodger, the person who conducted the massacre around the University of California, Santa Barbara, wanted to get revenge on fellow college students who were having a better time than him. Elliot felt as if the people on campus owed him something and he felt the need to get back at him so he decided to go about and kill them. The shooter didn’t have relationships with women so he targeted people who had better sex lives than him. He also went on to attack women at a sorority because he felt like all women owed him attention. He began his massacre by killing his roommates because they were students of UCSB and Elliot had been only a student at the community college nearby because he had been dropping lots of classes. The lack of success in his college life caused him to want to get back at everyone who was thriving with their classes and sex lives. Elliot Rodger was constantly denied by women and started to develop a hatred towards the entire female gender. Developing hatred towards entire groups was a theme for him because he was noted as being racist. We see college students struggle with the social changes of college so the added stress and anxiety causes someone to become mentally ill and act out on problems that aren’t necessarily big issues. Colleges can create preventative measures for incidents like this by adding security around sorority houses and increasing the amount of police on and around campus. Psychological evaluations should be done of people who seem to be having issues on campus like dropping out of classes or even failing classes. Instances like this can cause people to develop mental illness and college campuses like Florida State University have been starting free counseling for mental health and well as on campus psychiatrists that help clinically treat people who have the potential to inflict terror like Elliot Rodger put on the students at University of California, Santa Barbara.