As of lunchtime, I know the name of the shooter, the guns he used, and details of his personal life. The politicos haven’t wasted any time pouncing on it as an issue, and the Brady Campaign already has a petition for Congress to ban classes of people from buying guns who are already prohibited from buying guns.
But I can’t find the names of any of his victims anywhere in the news. I’m not sure what that says about us.
The real conversation we need to be having isn’t about guns. That’s the easy way out. We need to ask ourselves what we’re doing as a society that we breed such monsters from time to time. We can (and probably will) study James Holmes in hopes of finding out what about him is so utterly broken, but we’ll come up empty-handed. We can put him to death, but that won’t deter others like him. Continued...