Theater Shooting

Horrible, of course.  I used to have stronger reactions to these inexplicable acts of mayhem and violence, especially the Columbine shooting.  The fear of such things, of course, is that they could happen more frequently and allow nutjobs to dictate how we live our lives because of the availability of powerful guns, etc.  But from a systemic perspective, such events could never happen a lot - in fact they only are able to happen because they are infrequent.  If such events happened often, people would simply start carrying around guns and put an end to it quickly.  9/11 demonstrated this - within 45 minutes of the first plane being hijacked, passengers on United 93 had already figured out the counter-response.  And it didn't even require trained experts or governmental authority to use force.  The story of United 93 is so amazing every time I stop to think about it - how ordinary people within the span of such a short time, in this day and age, went from ordinary folks into heroes.

I suppose the finger pointing will commence for the next couple days and then we'll all remember there are disturbed people who will always do insane things for the same old reasons people have always done insane things.