Written by Mikyle J. Lockwood   

I’m afraid I’ve become overly-desensitized to this kind of violence. We’ve seen it all before, not even in a movie or other work of fiction, but in real life. No one can call it “unthinkable” or “unimaginable” anymore. Now it’s just another category within recorded crime statistics.

The response will be the same. After we’ve finished mourning the dead, we’ll switch to psychoanalyzing the perpetrator. Not content to place sole responsibility upon the killer, one group will call for restrictions on the availability of assault weapons and body armor, hoping that depriving would-be assailants of their slaughter-enabling tools will decrease the likelihood similar killing-sprees will occur in the future. Another group will argue that it is our culture of fetishized violence that inures young men to the consequences of their actions, and implore us to avoid the pop-culture swamp that inspires impressionable minds to commit atrocities.

Yet another group will shake their heads in pity that such terrible events continually befall the poor, unsuspecting public, but will resist any societal change because they are making plenty of money selling military-grade weaponry for sport and glamorized violence for entertainment. And these are the people who will win the day, if only because it is easier to change nothing.

Who holds what share of the blame? That’s an argument that will go around in circles until we get tired and go back to sleep, lulled into the fantasy where terrible things do happen (they always will) but never to the people we love. At least, the odds are in our favor. We’d all like to believe that, and we do, until our number comes up and tragedy hits like a train.

The horror of last night’s shooting is a ghastly visage of what cannot be called unimaginable evil, for no degree of imagination is necessary when the ground is still slick with the blood of infants. What’s truly horrifying is the prospect of inexplicable evil, of unpredictable and unpreventable murder. Worse still, and the fundamental tragedy within all of this, is that in the face of these purposeless massacres, the frequency of which is striking, there is a much greater likelihood of it happening again than of we as a society coming together to do anything about it.

Maybe there’s nothing we can do. If so, maybe I’m right in not feeling much of anything when confronted with the worst mankind has to offer. Acceptance is submission to the governing reality, and there’s nothing to gain by internalizing every incidence of human depravity. But it feels wrong to accept mass-murder as just a part of the business of being alive. Losing faith in the possibility that we can change this—that we can make it better somehow, feels like losing a part of what makes me human. But as yet another group of innocent people dies, for the same reason or lack thereof as the last, I’m finding it hard to do anything but harden myself to the day the wheel stops turning and my number comes up.