Looking for answers?

Across the political spectrum, and across the country, people want answers.  They say they want to know why Adam Lanza shot all of those children. And even though the incident is over and the shooter is dead, they say they want something done.  Then when they don’t get the answers they want, they supply their own. Many liberals are very predictably blaming guns — especially the “gun culture” and the “easy availability of firearms.” Many conservatives also blame the culture, and in a notable example that caught my attention earlier, a writer who claims to represent the Tea Party movement has thrown together all his gripes, including lack of religion, moral relativism, centralized bureaucracy, pornography and legalized marijuana, and “our respective national sins.” (Sorry, while many of his gripes are legitimate, there are over 300 million Americans who had nothing whatsoever to do with this loony kid’s murderous rampage, and his sin is not theirs.) Movies and violent video games are being blamed by various sides, and the conspiracy theories are already starting up; one is that both Lanza’s father as well as the father of Aurora theater shooter James Holmes were witnesses about to testify in hearings into the Libor financial scandal. (A rather strange way of intimidating witnesses, I must say. I’m skeptical.)

[UPDATE: M. Simon emailed me to point out that the above link to the story alleging a Libor scandal connection is dead, but the story is now here. Thanks!]

Liberals forget that guns are inanimate objects, that in good hands they can save innocent lives, while in evil hands they can take them. Conservatives who blame the culture seem to forget that the shooter was so out of touch with reality that he was burning himself with a cigarette lighter because he couldn’t feel pain, and his mother (who seemed like a decent person trying to cope with an awful burden) was apparently making plans to have him committed. I have seen this type of thinking for years. Every time there is another awful incident, people jump in with their pet causes and make connections. Everyone is to blame except whoever did it.  Once again, I think this is because it is emotionally unsatisfying to simply admit that some people are just bad people, and they do bad things:

…saying that some people are evil is emotionally unsatisfying, and it doesn’t fit the prevailing, overarching narrative agreed on by both “sides” in the Culture War that there is something inherently evil about society which causes people to commit atrocious crimes. Michael Moore and the John Lennon Imagine people think the problem is that we live in an evil, militaristic “gun culture,” while the Robert Knight, Concerned Women for America types think sex, drugs, rock and roll, homos, abortion, and other coarse culture rot create a climate that makes these awful crimes inevitable. But the idea that some people are just bad? That just goes nowhere, especially in the hyper-charged, traffic-driven political context.

Those were my thoughts over two years ago as I contemplated a mass murder of school children committed here in Michigan in 1927, but nothing has changed in the way people think — or fail to. Megan McArdle is being excoriated on the left for her simple, painfully obvious observation:

There’s Little We Can Do to Prevent Another Massacre

I think she is right, because some people are simply bad, and their conduct cannot be accurately predicted or prevented, just as the occasional dog will become vicious. And when that happens, it is not the fault of the rest. But again, that is not a satisfying answer. I’m thinking that a lot of times when people claim they are looking for answers, they don’t really mean that they want honest answers. They want their answers to be the answers. There’s an old legal expression that bad cases make for bad law, and similarly, I think bad incidents make for bad narratives. Maybe unsatisfying facts create a demand for “facts” that satisfy.