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George Sodini, Gym Shooting | 08/06/2009 10:10 am

Pennsylvania Gym Shooter George Sodini Had Pent-Up Rage Toward Women (Video)

Videos and online diaries of 48-year-old gunman show he was a disturbed man who hadn’t had a date in years, and who clearly had trouble connecting with women.
By The Staff at wowOwow.com
YouTube

We’re hearing more disturbing news coming out of Pennsylvania after a reclusive gunman walked into a local gym with three guns, killing three women, wounding nine others, then killing himself.

Everyone is trying to understand the motives behind 48-year-old gunman George Sodini of Carnegie, PA, which is just a few miles from the L.A. Fitness Club where his Tuesday rampage took place. What we now know, however, is that Sodini’s run of bad luck with women seems to have fueled his hatred for them.

Sodini made videos of himself in which he talked about his difficulty connecting with women, how he was trying to be more "emotional" for them and how he just doesn’t understand why women don’t like him, and posted the videos on YouTube. In one of the videos, books on how to date women can be seen. "My objective is to be real and to be emotional … because when I’m ten to 20 years older than she is, she has to feel good about this thing," Sodini says in one video.

ABC News reports
that Sodini briefly considered halting his shooting, according to his online blog. He wrote that if a particular woman he admired would be his girlfriend, he would "cancel this plan or put [it] on hold, at least for a while." We still don’t know who that woman is.

"At the gym I saw a woman I like. I see her at the park-and-ride sometimes, so she isn’t a stranger. Occationaly [sic] she makes good eye contact and smiles, etc. She is maybe 40ish, and attractive to me," Sodini wrote. "I made brief conversation to her and a younger woman she was with today. To get a friend like her (and for night time action) I would cancel this plan, or put on hold, at least for a while."

Sodini’s website diary even referred to his plan to randomly kill women and himself. He said he hadn’t had sex since 1990. The Philadelphia Enquirer says the often rambling entries showed a man full of hopelessness, one who loathed women, religion, his family, blacks, coworkers, life and himself. Police said Sodini once belonged to a church but stopped attending after an incident in 2006, during which a pastor said he had "overreached" with a woman.

"It’s of no surprise to me that he’s targeting women … the leader of this [exercise] class was about to be a mother," one mental-health expert told MSNBC this morning, adding that perhaps Sodini’s own mother treated him poorly. "It’s this perfect storm of having severe depression, mild rage, he felt like he was being bullied."

Patricia Cowen lived across the street from George Sodini. She learned that he wrote about her daughter, referring to her as "a long haired, hot little hottie with a beautiful bod." The thought that this man lived so close to her family and was watching them was "devastating," she told CBS News.

"It’s just so overwhelming," Cowen said. "Just the idea of somebody like that thinking like that for a young girl. My daughter is a college student, and, you know, just to think if I would lose somebody like that, I don’t know what I would do."

This horrible tragedy happened at a gym, where we go to work out some stress and try to relax. Does this shooting make you question the safety and comfort level at your own gym?

Here’s one video Sodini made, during which he talks about trying to find a woman:

54 Reader Comments (so far…) Sign In or Register to comment

Anna Moss

Belinda, I think you mistook my meaning. I didn’t mean to say that Sodino was a pedophile, drug addict, etc. I did mean to say that severely damaged people become pedophiles, drug addicts, etc. This is not my opinion. This is what is known so far.

Sodino may have seemed like an average guy for a while, but he crossed the line and there were warning signs that nobody recognized.

The reason I’ve spent time on this blog today is to point out the similarities between the Pittsburgh event and hard-to-see, hard-to-believe warning signs of abuse. It was a terrible tragedy and a teachable moment.

 It will be interesting to see what is revealed as we learn more.

By Anna Moss on 08/06/2009 8:50 pm
Kelly In Texas

Very good posts Anna… I agree with you on many points.

I had read a book about serial killers and the many similar things that they had to have to be so inclined. Abuse, blows to the head, malnutrition, to name a few…

I have know some men that just seemed to be missing what it took for their brain to understand what it was that they should be feeling….and although unfortunate…they are a broken human.

Neither glue, empathy, nor shrink can fix them.

By Kelly In Texas on 08/09/2009 12:34 am
Alek Novy
The good that will come from this tragic event is that a lot of men who see themselves in him, will hopefully recognize their thought process is skewed and decide to get some help.
Unfortunately, the higher likelihood is that more men will imitate him instead of seeking out help.

Society trains men to repress their feelings and to "man up". We live in a culture of man-bashing, where the first thing you learn as man is that you’re born as a scum evil-doer and all men are idiots.

Men commit 400% more suicide, and virtually all of it romance-related. Men also commit 1000% more suicide then women after break-ups and/or divorce.

The lesson that need be learned from this story is that society needs to start treating men as humans (yes, that means men have emotions too)… Men are made fun of for expressing emotion or sharing personal problems… so it bottles on the inside, until the person acts out in agression towards either self or others. 

Women are taught that men are emotionless demons and treat them as such… as does the media.
By Alek Novy on 08/06/2009 2:07 pm
Maggie W

You mention emotions; so does the shooter.  There is much truth in what you say.  A couple of years ago, I had lunch with my cousin and three of her friends.  One had been treated badly in her marriage.  My cousin reassured her by saying that all men, given the chance, would cheat in a marriage.  I was surprised and disagreed, holding up my own dad and her dad as examples of the best mankind could offer in the way of husbands and fathers.  Much to my surprise, her friends agreed with her.

I am either quite naive, or there’s much going on during " working lunches" that have given these women such a dim view of men in general.

By Maggie W on 08/06/2009 3:53 pm
caj p
The good old 2nd amendment working well!!  Time to address that out dated and antiquated law.  Too many deaths day after day and all because of this stupid gun law.  Ban all guns I say.
By caj p on 08/06/2009 3:11 pm
Maggie W

caj p… It was our governor, Mr. Perfect Hair Perry, who suggested Texas could secede.  It probably would if anyone tried to take our deer rifles away.  It is time to address that law; there is absolutely no reason to have assault weapons!  There may not have been a Columbine if Dylan and Klebold hadn’t been able to get those weapons so easily.  It would put major brakes on organized crime and the drug cartels that are now in this country.  Not to mention the teenage gangs and their drive bys.

But.. who will take on the NRA

By Maggie W on 08/06/2009 3:32 pm
Mahulda Fite

This has nothing to do with the "2nd amendment". Criminals and crazy people out to kill others don’t, by definition, follow LAWS. All the laws in the world won’t stop someone hell bent on killing whether you ban guns or not. Only law abiding citizens follow laws—criminals ignore laws. The only outcome from "banning guns" is that you would have the upstanding citizens unable to defend themselves against criminals who don’t have a problem breaking the law.

Besides, the 2nd amendment is not a law—it is a RIGHT.

By Mahulda Fite on 08/06/2009 5:27 pm
Anna Moss

The first facts that this horrific event confirms are:

75 percent of women are attacked the first six months after exiting an abusive relationship.

George Sodini lived for 48 years with red flags waving wildly all around him and no one connected the dots.

The perpetrators and targets of abuse are not who you think they are.

Deeply disturbed and disconnected men such as Sodini were likely organically damaged by neglecte or abuse as baby boys.

Last month a man wired his house with explosives and chained his wife to the wall. This month a rejected boyfriend retaliated with three guns in a gym. With economic stress and personal strife at high levels, what will happen next month?

The warning signs of abusive persons and relationships have been decoded. It is not intuitive knowledge, it is specialized discernment. www.relationshipredflags.com

By Anna Moss on 08/06/2009 3:24 pm
Mary Quite-Contrary
I am not dismissing your excellent post (and link) regarding abusive relationships…it just doesn’t really apply here. The only “flags waving” were on his blog, which given his apparent lack of human interaction…went unnoticed in the broad blogosphere. Sodini had no relationship with his siblings; no friends (just associates) at the mid-sized Pittsburgh law firm where he worked as the stereotypical, nerdy IT geek. He did not interact with his neighbors…he didn’t even have a pet. All of this has been mentioned in the dozens of local news pieces on this horrific act. He was functional at work; yet would apparently fixate on a random smile (or lack therof) from any women he encountered on a bus…or at the gym; grocery store. He was “wired” differently…something was so askew, so devoid of humanity that he could do the shooting…but…just to put it in perspective, one of the local law enforcement officers investigating said he believed Sodini turned the lights off, before shooting, because he couldn’t “watch” what he was doing. Chilling.
By Mary Quite-Contrary on 08/06/2009 10:11 pm
william currigan
doesn’t matter how smart someone is, they can still be a social R-tard.  He clearly was.  You can tell someone’s social skills and how their brain is wired by how they talk.  Listen to his pattern of speech and will may see how his brain didn’t have all the wiring hooked up.  Cognitive dsyfunction of a sort.  JMO.
By william currigan on 08/06/2009 9:00 pm
Melanie Waldrop

I cannot help but wonder if this guy ever applied to any of the MANY internet dating communities available. I suspect he didn’t. He just seems like sociopath with an agenda to take out all of his rage and pain on innocent people. In his mind women (any and all women) were responsible for his unhappiness in life…Of course, his lack of sexual and/or life partners could not be attributed to anything which was wrong with HIM! George Sodini exemplified the reason that mental illness is such a difficult problem to treat. A person who doesn’t believe he needs any help can never be helped.

By Melanie Waldrop on 08/07/2009 10:06 am
Jay Jones
OK guns guns guns, but if he did not have access to guns then he would have used some other method. A pipe bomb perhaps. Persons in prisons don’t have access to guns but yet seem perfectly capable of killing their peers when they feel like it. It is about the motives and actions of the individual and not an inanimate object. It is so easy to be ignorant and take the blame off the person who did this and put it on gun laws/control. It makes you feel better that if we control guns we can stop this kind of behavior.
By Jay Jones on 08/07/2009 3:27 pm
Melanie Waldrop
It is undeniably easier for someone who is hell-bent on multiple homicide (especially when one wants to kill specific individuals) to do so with guns. If nothing else, not everyone is technically capable of making pipe bombs (Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris tried, but their bombs malfunctioned…their guns did their deadly work though!).
By Melanie Waldrop on 08/07/2009 3:55 pm
Andrea Brandon

It wasn’t about guns. Guns were just accessible. If they weren’t available he would have found another way to annihilate a group of women.

He readily admitted that women didn’t like him. Does anyone know if he wrote why they didn’t?

But that may not matter. Look for info about his mother and his relationship with her.

 

By Andrea Brandon on 08/07/2009 10:54 pm
aud b

Sorry, but I gotta say this…. Obviously this guy had a mental illness.   So, to the scientologists out there… Um, yeah, this cat exercised, ate right, and probably took vitamins….. Mental illness exists and needs MEDICAL TREATMENT!

I really really feel bad for this guy who lived in his own personal hell for years on end and for the people who died because of his illness. 

By aud b on 08/08/2009 12:01 am