I find it amusing, in an ironic and sad kind of way, when people try and figure out why an insane person did something. It’s insanity!
Shooting a whole bunch of school children is the act of an insane person. You can come up with all the reasons you want, but the simple fact is the act wasn’t rational, it wasn’t sane.
It’s offensive, too. Every time it happens, the newspapers and the experts line up to study the killer like a riddle, digging through his childhood for the key that will make it all make sense, while the children he murdered fade into the background of his story. I think that’s backwards, and it disgusts me.
For all we know, he thought space aliens were invading and he was doing his duty to protect us. Who knows? Who cares? It wasn’t something a rational, sane person would do, and no amount of digging through his life is going to turn it into one. Blowing up a building in Oklahoma City with a rented truck full of fertilizer, something nobody does by accident, is the act of an insane person. Whatever his reasons were, they weren’t the reasons of a rational being, and I refuse to dignify them by pretending otherwise.
What sane people do
Rational, sane beings can sit down and talk with one another. Sane people understand there are lots of options. Talk. Move. Run. Hide. Eat. Bribe. Protest. Picket. Whatever. There are many, many options to work out one’s problems.
If the home life of the kid who shot the children was so bad, he could have run off and joined the circus, or hitchhiked to another state, or some such thing. Instead, he chose to deliberately shoot children in a school.
The search for reasons
And now the newspapers are hunting for a reason, some rational cause. He didn’t like his mother, his mother was going to put him in an asylum, he didn’t like the flavor of his cookies, whatever. None of those are why he did it. He was insane. It’s that simple. Every motive a reporter serves up makes the act sound somehow “okay,” as if he had a reason, after all, however weird. Nope. He wasn’t sane. Period. Grown adults who pretend otherwise should know better.
Our legal system spends countless hours and millions, even billions, of dollars trying to prove whether someone who committed murder was sane or insane.
He murdered another human being (assuming it wasn’t an accident or self-defense). Premeditated murder isn’t the act of a sane being. Stop trying to find an excuse or a reason. Just stop it. All that money buys is a longer look at the killer.
There’s no excuse. There’s no reason. There’s no rationality to the act.
Blowing up a building in Iraq with a car bomb isn’t sane. Blowing up a building in Oklahoma isn’t rational. Shooting school kids isn’t rational. Putting on a vest with explosives and walking into a crowded mall isn’t something a sane person does.
I don’t want to know his reasons. I’ve read enough of these tidy explanations after enough of these tragedies to know they never explain anything, and I’m sick of the ritual. I’m done treating the killer like a puzzle worth solving. What he did was madness with a body count, and whatever attention I have left goes to the people he hurt.