One thing that usually becomes very obvious during a tragedy is that people very much want to help each other. The reason this is obvious is that everybody has an idea about what should be done about it, how they or others can help, how it should be prevented from happening again. Nobody goes, “Oh yes, those victims deserved it!” Or at least, only a small percentage do—usually a small percentage of people who we already know are basically crazy.
This is why, every time there is a tragedy, people come up with explanations of why it happened and what should be done about it. If they can’t figure out truly, basically why it happened, they will still want to prevent it. This usually manifests itself as blaming non-causative things that were involved in the tragedy and saying something should be done about those non-causative things.
Let’s take an example that isn’t recent, so that we don’t stir up the flames of recent tragedy and upset. The Nazis used gas chambers to kill people. Who is at cause? The Nazis. However, if one didn’t wish to confront Nazis (since that’s certainly unpleasant to confront) one could say that the use of gas to kill people like that should be banned, and in fact I believe that it is, now. In other words, it’s easier to focus on the gas (a non-causative but very simple culprit) than on the Nazis (a causative agent, but also a difficult-to-confront evil).
This is even more complex when the culprit is incomprehensible. One of the key qualities of insanity is incomprehensibility. That is, insane people are almost impossible to understand. If you’ve ever been personally around an institutional psychotic, you’ll know what I mean. They do things for no good reason, they say things that don’t make sense, they have emotional reactions that are completely disconnected from reality, and they are extremely confusing to the people around them.
So what you tend to see when a crazy person does something bad is others blaming the tools they used to commit the crime, or some other material object that was involved (like drugs) rather than some actual person who was involved directly or indirectly. What is frequently overlooked is that there was often somebody involved in making this person crazy, whether that was their drug dealer, their doctor, their “best friend,” their psychiatrist, their mentor, or some other person.
Most people do not come out of the womb thinking, “Boy, I would like to buy a gun and shoot some people when I get older.” Their ideas are crafted by some sort of false education, or the drugs that warp their mind are provided by somebody. A very few are born insane, but mostly, it’s not a gun, it’s not a drug, it’s not a bomb or a knife that causes things—it’s a person, a being, or a group of beings.
Max Kanat-Alexander 