On Friday when I got online, I found the awful news about the guy who went into a theater showing the new Batman film & shot all of those people, including a 6 year old girl. I was upset and sad and wondered how many more times this has to happen before gun laws are changed in this country. There is no earthly reason why someone needs an assault rifle that can shoot 60 or 70 bullets a minute. Those kinds of guns were developed for the military and ought to stay in the hands of professionally trained people. Though the thought of shooting any living thing at that rate is actually revolting to me. There are very few just wars, WW2 is probably the only one I can think of, and I am a pacifist at heart.
There just seems to be a rash of people going out and killing perfect strangers for no good reason. It's not just in the US, as that guy in Sweden showed a couple years ago. But the US makes it so easy to obtain these powerful guns and unlimited ammunition and so hard to put any kind of restrictions on them at all. I don't agree that everyone who does this kind of mass shooting is mentally unbalanced, either. Someone can be evil without being crazy. I said at the time the Swedish incident happened that he couldn't be crazy because of the planning and logistics. I don't think this Batman shooter is crazy either. I think he wasn't emotionally connected with other people & that allowed him to withdraw into a fantasy world & at some point, he never came out of the fantasy.
One of the things that almost always comes out after these kinds of events is how isolated the person was, whether at school, at home, anywhere, there's never friends, close family or even pen pals. When someone spends that much time in their own company, unrelieved, things start to feel hopeless and to cope, they form another world to live in. There was an article over the weekend about how this guy was rejected from a gun club in his area because people in the club thought he had a strange message on his voice mail, though they didn't explain what was strange about it. The possibility is posed that had this guy been admitted to the gun club, he might have found companionship and an outlet to shoot his gun harmlessly. Instead it was one more rejection.
So instead of people automatically wondering how someone could do such an act, they ought to be thankful that there aren't more people like that. And thankful that they have friends and relationships to make them feel connected and that they matter to other people. Sometimes people take that for granted. And following the thought that friends & a support network is necessary to people to live healthy lives, perhaps we ought to make more of an effort to notice the lonely and isolated amongst us. If we did, we might prevent another tragedy. It's certainly worth trying.