Dumbstruck horror. That's the main reaction I have to what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I don't have kids -- a little ball of cells that grew inside my body and died after four weeks is as close as I've come. And I mourned that little ball of cells like nothing else -- I still am mourning it. It wasn't yet a boy or a girl. It didn't have its father's curly hair and my blue eyes. I never watched it learn to walk and talk or go off to school for the first time.
But if my pregnancy had survived -- my kid would be in elementary school right now.
And I could put myself in the shoes of every last one of the parents who lost a child in the massacre. But imagining that and fully embracing it would be the emotional equivalent of dropping myself into a bottomless pit. It wouldn't do me or them (or anyone who is expecting me to get any work done this weekend) any good.
I don't know what would do any good. Taking steps to try to prevent this from happening again seems like it should be a priority for our society. We can all agree on that one, right? Slaughtered kids are a bad thing. Guns don't kill people ... but they sure do seem to help. There's a school in China with twenty kids who are slashed and traumatized ... but they're still alive.
The headline on CNN is "Why? Why?". My coworkers condemned the shooter as "sick" and said "I can't understand why anyone would do that."
But ... I can imagine it. Imagining the shooter's motives is a whole lot safer for me emotionally than imagining the grief of the parents. But I've had practice handling dark thoughts with protective gloves on; professionally I have to crawl inside the heads of dysfunctional people for my fiction. Every villain is the hero of his own story. Perhaps for others sharing the grief is a lot easier than looking at a killer's mindset.
Clearly, the guy's brain was not working correctly. A well-adjusted, sane person does not gun down a room full of children. But a terrorist would have a reason, and so did this shooter. He killed his mother and went to the school. Why? If he didn't leave a note, we won't ever know for sure since we can't interview the dead.
It's possible he had his own selfish anger and hurt. Maybe he felt like his mom had cared more about her classroom over the years than she ever cared for him, and he grew to hate the class of kids he didn't see as real people. And he vowed he would expunge them as his last act on Earth.
Another possibility is that the adults in his life had grown increasingly pessimistic, and in the echo chamber of his malfunctioning brain their casual complaints about the economy and the future and the failures of love had become amplified until he was convinced they were all doomed. He'd convinced himself he didn't have anything to look forward to other than pointless pain and struggle, and neither did the kids in his beloved mom's beloved classroom. Perhaps he felt he was taking the only action that made sense to him.
Maybe he looked at the world, decided it was a waste, and figured the only thing he could do that would matter to the world was to kill people and get on CNN. Or maybe the voices in his head told him that if he didn't sacrifice his mom and those precious to her, something even worse would happen here on Earth.
I don't know if any of that is even remotely close to the truth. I don't know what would have stopped this tragedy. I don't even know why his mom felt compelled to buy the guns he used against her and the school. But I do know that dismissing people like him as incomprehendable monsters doesn't help, either. It makes the rest of us feel better to talk of evil and wash our hands while we declare "Not one of us!", sure. But it doesn't help keep this from happening again.