Comes, once again, nothing but pontificating and a cavalcade of “experts” ready to lend their same old, worn-out opinions. Reporters badger innocent people and inadvertently make a martyr out of some screwed-up 19 year old who lost his shitty job at McDonalds and lost his girlfriend, all after losing his family.

I’m, of course, talking about the mall shooting at Westroads Mall in Omaha, NE. I’m talking about Robert Hawkins, whose name will now enter the American lexicon along with all of the other messed-up kids who decided that their only way out was with a gun. It’s sad. It’s unnecessary. It’s beyond some people’s ability to comprehend.

So, what do we do? We question, we speculate, we make questionable speculations. All the time forgetting to keep in mind Ockham’s Razor, the theory that states that the most obvious answer is usually the correct one. In this case, Robert was suffering from depression, he was estranged from his parents, he’d lost his job and his girlfriend. Gee, I wonder why he decided to open fire on a bunch of innocent shoppers in a suburban mall and then kill himself?

I’m not trying to sound cold and heartless, but look at the big picture here. Nearly 4000 young American men and women have died in Iraq, not to mention untold amounts of innocent Iraqis. People die every day, under much more dire circumstances. Why do we feel the need to glorify those who chose to shoot up malls or schools? That’s what happens when the 24-hour news networks go apeshit every time one of these kids goes nuts, they glorify it. It may not be their intention, but it’s the end result.

I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before video games or violent movies or music are brought up by some talking head as the reason behind this latest shooting spree. They’re just patsies, excuses. We feel the need to create that degree of separation, to find out the serious faults that make them not like the rest of us, to make them outsiders who we cannot relate to, to make them an isolated incident, the exception and not the rule. Because we can’t handle the actual truth: that we’re just as capable of doing what they did.

I’m not saying that we’re all just a bad hair day away from grabbing a rifle and shooting up a JC Penney. What I am saying is that the capability for such violence is inside each and every one of us. it doesn’t always come to the surface for each of us. In fact, for most of us, it never does. But if you think you can tell me that the road-raging guy in the jacked-up Chevy isn’t capable of killing someone, you’re being a bit naive. But being capable of something and actually following through are two very different things, of course.

99% of us will never actually follow through on some of our more violent inclinations, couldn’t even imagine doing so, as a matter of fact. But, subconsciously, they are there. It’s just another one of the evolutionary remnants floating around in our DNA, left over from a time when we had to be violent just to survive. And that scares us. Our learned morality tells us that violence is wrong, that killing is wrong, that we need to live together in harmony. So, we feel the need to create that separation between ourselves and those who discard that learned morality for the more violent past, because we simply do not want to accept that we aren’t all that different from them.

Truth is, though, we are. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can really begin to mourn what happened yesterday in Omaha. The best part is, we won’t need CNN or MSNBC or FoxNews to tell us how to feel.