School Shootings

Impossible to comprehend the enormity of acts like the one yesterday in that little schoolroom in the peaceful Amish countryside of Pennsylvania, Bush. Five little girls killed! The human mind reaches for explanations and solutions where there are none. Some will want to explain it as an act of pure evil. I don't see it that way. I see it as the unpredictable--and therefore unavoidable--result of some awful kink in a human mind, a piece of wiring gone horribly wrong. Even the search for psychological or emotional explanations will prove eventually futile. A twenty-year old grudge? A childhood wound? We all have them, don't we? But not all of us wake up one day with the notion to go out and kill children. We may not want to think so, but acts such as these, I believe, are essentially inexplicable--at least given our present state of understanding of our complex, unpredictable selves.

There will be no shortage of solutions proffered by those who think they can protect us. We will agonize over whether our children are safe in their schools. Some will blame the availablity of guns and urge stricter laws. As you'll probably guess, Bush, I myself favor a more rational approach to gun laws than those which permit the wide availability of lethal weapons to those who use them for criminal or hate-filled purposes. I believe we have far too many of them in the hands of those who lack the responsibility to use them wisely. But I suspect that stricter gun laws would not have prevented this tragedy from happening.

Some will blame the lack of protection for our children and call for metal detectors at every door to every school, for the ubiquitous presence of armed guards and security personnel... Their goal is total immunity from risk and danger, the cocooning of our children--indeed, of our society--until we are all so protected from others and ourselves that we will have sacrificed every freedom that we have. They, too, are wrong. Obsessed as we are by the dangers that threaten us at every turn, we will never achieve the guaranteed safety that we seem, as a society, to demand. Something, inevitably, will go wrong. A fuse will blow, either on the circuit that controls the electrical security fence or in some fragile human mind, and tragedy will ensue.

We are right to be astounded and appalled by such incomprehensible events, whether man-made or natural. Where we err, I think, is in the arrogant belief that we have the power to completely control them or prevent them. In the memorable words of one who should have done much more, and was empowered to do much more to prevent tragedy, "Stuff happens." He was right in his assertion. He was wrong to use it as an excuse for a lack of foresight and an abdication of responsibility. Somewhere there is a middle path between irresponsibility and acceptance.

In cirumstances of this kind, however, we can do little other than mourn the cruel and senseless loss of life. It is, in a word, a tragedy. And tragedy, by definition, transcends the comfortable world of rational explanations.