The disaffected loner carrying a weapon to school to take out his anger on this person or that clique. The specific beef leading to the random payback that falls, with the equality of rain, upon those the kid hated and those he didn't even know. He maims and kills with a cold randomness that sucks the breath out of you. And our response in the aftermath is the same, too. We sift the heart of tragedy with an archaeologist's care, looking for clues to why.
Experts pop up on the morning news shows like dandelions on the lawn.
Gun enthusiasts and gun-control advocates restate their positions. And news media dutifully assign a moral to the story, a lesson we are to learn, a theme we are to ponder. This latest one, we are told, is about the scrawny, unpopular kid, scorned by his classmates, set upon by bullies. The kids at the center of this recent wave of random school violence are startlingly alike in several ways. All live in rural or suburban areas, nearly all are male and nearly all are white.