Yet another hor­rific shoot­ing. It’s hard to keep off the news feeds for each bit of new infor­ma­tion we learn of the per­pe­tra­tor and his vic­tims. It’s nat­ural to want to under­stand. If we do finally learn of a moti­va­tion behind James Holmes’s actions, it will prob­a­bly be more the trig­ger that set him off—the straw that broke the camel’s back, per­haps, or the dan­ger­ous obses­sion that’s informed his world of late.

A few years ago there was a fel­low from a nearby town who declared him­self the grand wiz­ard of his own branch of the Klu Klux Klan. He would announce plans for a march a local town and instantly the media would be rac­ing their news vans there to get reac­tions from politi­cians, police chiefs and ran­dom peo­ple on the street. Head­lines would ensue, blog­gers would go to work, counter-protests would be announced, etc. But the grand wiz­ard turned out to be mostly an Oz-like appari­tion of smoke. No estab­lished KKK orga­ni­za­tion rec­og­nized him. His ral­lies would attract at most two of his bud­dies. He was in his early for­ties and liv­ing with his mother. He was fired after three weeks work­ing at Wawa, the local con­ve­nience store chain. Yes, he could have been a dan­ger if he had got­ten a hold of a cache of guns but he never did. He was a guy who was a loser at every­thing except get­ting media atten­tion for out­ra­geous pro­posal. Last I looked up he’s got reli­gion, recanted his racist ide­ol­ogy, and apol­o­gized for the KKK talk.

Another story I could tell is more per­sonal, of a not-so-distant rel­a­tive who went on a middling-murder spree—five dead in the end (I’ll omit details for rea­sons of fam­ily diplo­macy). I only met him once but I’ve come to know the set­ting that shaped him. Some of the issues that shaped him go back gen­er­a­tions and are still active. To tell the story of his snap would take a novel on the order of Jef­frey Eugendies’s Mid­dle­sex. I have an autis­tic son and know that this con­di­tion runs in the fam­ily. I try to imag­ine throw­ing him into a main­stream school set­ting with no sup­port and no diag­no­sis, and then bring­ing him up in the fam­ily tra­di­tion of alcohol-based self-medication; a stint on the armed forces would just add to the explo­sive mix. Forty years from now my pre­cious lit­tle boy might well be the top story on Action News. And it would be a tragedy.

If I had a time machine, I think I’d do exper­i­ments to under­stand the nexus of ide­ol­ogy and indi­vid­ual per­son­al­ity. I’d give a 24-year-old Osama bin Laden a desk job in an obscure Saudi min­istry, and an 18-year-old Adolf Hitler a prize to a pres­ti­gious for­eign art school.

Vio­lent ide­olo­gies are often the per­verted man­i­fes­ta­tion of less-visible per­sonal and fam­ily tragedies. I hope we can find a way to step back from the voyeurism of Col­orado details to find ways to extend our­selves in love and care. Tonight, when you feel rage or indig­na­tion, call up a friend or rel­a­tive in pain. Yes, gun con­trol can help les­son the imme­di­ate tragedy. But let’s not for­get the long-term solu­tions. Think about how we lobby to  widen access to med­ical care (e.g.: uni­ver­sal health­care) and pro­grams for the needy of our youth (hint: fund the schools, expand special-needs pro­grams, bring back after-school pro­grams and enrich­ment oppor­tun­ties). There are three– and six-and eighteen-year-old’s out there tee­ter­ing on cross­roads of alter­nate futures. Let’s hold out our hands and invite them to paths of heal­ing and love.