First, we gain from a stranger s violent death even while deploring it. Second, as individuals and groups we must interpret the random, the bizarre, whatever threatens. We need to make sense of it with a theory of good and evil. Sacrifice in war is noble and immortalizes heroes. Psychiatrists familiar with post-traumatic stress disorder know that victims of crime or disaster often blame themselves.
Guilt seems better than impotence, and any causality seems better than none.
The dominant ideology holds that we get what we deserve. They we all struggle to make meaningful tragedy out of accidents, cruelty, indifference and stupidity and, regarding our gun culture, collective irresponsibility. Rank points out that, although we do not sacrifice children to propitiate gods of war and weather, vestiges of primitive magic lurk beneath cultural rituals and rationalizations. In this sense we sacrifice many innocents in order to indulge a paranoid interpretation of the Second Amendment, the clear intent of which is to have a well-regulated militia. Deaths by murder, accident, storm, war or capital punishment distract us from the fact that death is natural and inevitable.