I'm certainly not making excuses for these guys, but neither of them really fit the profile, especially the younger one. You want to go do something that may ruin or end your own life, that's fine, but when you get married and/or have kids, your life is no longer truly your own. And the fact that your offspring will have to carry on the shame something you've done should be a deterrent.

I prefer to focus on the crimes they committed and not the people they left behind because a lot of people who died left a lot of people behind without a choice. Someone talked to me about his girlfriend's uncle who was this big shot business tycoon, made lots of money but was incredibly stressed and with some problems with his mental health. He was one day from being committed when he committed suicide via hanging. He left a family of 5 kids behind. My buddy kept on talking about not the act of suicide but the consequences of leaving behind a whole family, scarring his kids. But that's a whole other conversation.

For me, people who commit crimes like this and get killed in the process. They knew the consequences, the death, violence, chaos, etc. The people they leave behind, they either didn't think about it or knew it and didn't care enough. Some people for them, their families alone is not enough of a reason to keep on living anymore.

Ok, maybe these bombers weren't planning on dying but when you plant bombs, you knew the risks and what happens. These guys killed innocent people with families, killed a cop who had a family that's going to miss him.

I looked at the older brother's history a bit more. His family pushed him into kickboxing and more religion to try and better channel his aggressive behavior (which wouldn't be made any better by growing up in Chechnya). Instead, he started to go for the darker side of radical Islam and became more fundamentalist. His coach and someone who sparred with him described him as arrogant despite his talent, while the sparring partner said that he was a "coward" and lacked competitiveness. He beat his wife, calling her a prostitute and slut and demanding that she convert to Islam and cover herself.

What it all looks like is that Tamerlan was already a violent person, and the efforts to get him on the straight and narrow didn't help. Fundamentalist religious beliefs gave him an excuse to resort to violence against people he didn't like, and he probably bullied his younger brother from an early age and essentially dragged him into it. He was a douchebag using his radical beliefs as an excuse for hurting people. It's a selfishness that makes you wonder how much he truly cared for his wife and child.

So it turns out that the brothers actually had only one gun - a Ruger SR9 that was fired by Tamerlan.

Why on Earth would you link to something by Alex Jones? That dude is a fucking moron.

Actually it wasn't the article of Alex Jones I was looking at. It was just the video. I didn't even read the article. I just forgot that the vid is youtube and I could have just linked the youtube vid directly. I also didn't want to repost even single photo of guns LEOs and their guns on this thread.


Apparently they couldn't get the gun from the cop they killed because his holster prevented them from taking it.