coffee addict,
But don’t we claim the same thing about Yiddishkeit? Don’t we say that Torah makes a person more eidel, that a proper Jewish education should give someone better midos?
Respectfully, your taana sounds quite similar to the taana of the “chilonim” when something happens in the frum community at large: “The chreidim paint themselves as holier than thou because they learn Torah and keep mitzvos, yet…”
Of course, the answer to both taanos is: Our learning is supposed to affect us, and hopefully it does for many people. Is that to say that we don’t have a yetzer hara? Does Hashem take away our bechira chofshis to do something wrong?
Unfortunately, the media doesn’t have a shortage of times where someone who was considered a holy yerei shamayim committed terrible wrongdoings which are completely unbefitting of a ben Torah.
This is especially relevant in a case when many bochurim involved in such acts are indeed people who haven’t spent much of their time in yeshiva learning Torah, so it’s even more understandable that it didn’t have much of an effect on them.
And again, I wasn’t ch”v trying to JUSTIFY what happened by pointing out others who did it, two wrongs don’t make a right. I was trying to make two important points which I elaborated on above.