I’ll say this one last time and then I’ll let it go. When I was a youngster in the 50s, it was necessary to crush the head of the fetus of my Aunt Fay’s last pregnancy because the alternative was for my aunt to die in childbirth and leave five children without a mother. I do not know what was wrong with the fetus, except that it had an enormous head. No one is still alive who can tell me exactly what the reason was, but this Supreme Court ruling that does not make an exception for the health (or in this case life) of the mother is insufferably tyrranical. If you would choose to have your wife die in childbirth, fine. Just don’t celebrate the imposition of that requirement on people who do not share your religious ideology. It is genuinely un-American.

My heart goes out to Cho’s parents. When you don’t know who else to blame, it always seems to fall on the mother, eventually.

It may seem a little ghoulish, but one way I like to discuss events like this with philosophy students is to ask them whether the reason they haven’t committed a massacre today is that there’s a law against it, or that they don’t happen to have a gun with them today. It makes vivid just how out of the range of ordinary life the shooting is.

To get really dangerously close to overintellectualizing, this shooting truly is in a very important way meaningless - it’s an event that, not being there and involved, I can’t fit into my lived experience. There’s a boundary between my lived experience and the lived experience of someone who has gone “batshit,” and although we can try to translate the experience of being batshit, something is necessarily (and thankfully) lost in translation.

So instead, we get a media spectacle - not for shock value, but as shock treatment. Does it serve to hide our embarassment that human beings occasionally go batshit? Or that we can’t understand them?

One editorial this morning said that the combination of misogyny and homophobia in men who feel inadequate is often released in violence. It’s their way of proving that they are men.

Crazy people do crazy things, and until they do, it is impossible to do much about it. There was a kid in the school I work in most who scared several teachers, occasionally talked about a gun and you could see that he had the potential to do damage. What do you do? He never did anything. There were warning signs but no action.

If guns were as unavailable as they are in England or Japan the violence would have to be expressed in other ways. But getting to that point would be next to impossible. On the other hand how many hunters need a tripod mount, grenade launcher, magazine with 15 rounds and a silencer to kill deer? (The assault rifle ban prohibits any gun with MORE than one of these).

The death of a multitude is cause for mourning. Conduct your triumph as a funeral.

This isn’t the only one coming from them.