EDITORIAL – Killings can’t be explained with glib answers

A man opens fire at a Wisconsin church service, kills seven, injures four, and then shoots… A man opens fire at a Wisconsin church service, kills seven, injures four, and then shoots himself. Some media outlets are reporting that the shooter’s anger at a taped sermon may have spurred this. Police aren’t as quick to attribute blame, and report that no motive has been established.

A man allegedly opens fire in an Atlanta courtroom, reportedly killing the judge and a court reporter, then a deputy and a federal agent during his flight from the scene.

A man shoots the mother and husband of a U.S. district judge, and then kills himself during a routine traffic stop in Wisconsin. Some sources report that he was driven to this after the judge dismissed his medical malpractice suit.

A 4-year-old boy in Houston accidentally shoots his brother, police report. Officers who talked to the boy said he couldn’t understand what he had done.

Television reports for the past week have been populated by reports of gunfire, injury, death, dismay. Each of the above incidents is certainly a tragedy, and should be reported as such.

Whenever seemingly senseless violence strikes, many are quick to attribute these acts to simple answers, each suggestion more ridiculous than the last: American gun culture, drugs, religion, music, weather systems, video games, the media. It’s often the media illogically blaming the media — as if the accusers and the accused were separate entities, as if news programs criticizing violent programming on that network weren’t somehow contradictory.

After these events, we as the media and as Americans, participate in self-flagellation: What is it about our culture, about ourselves, that allows such things to happen? A CBS Web site with the report about the two brothers has an accompanying graphic with interactive features on “Guns in America” and “Children in Danger.”

And as always, whenever a shooting spree occurs — whether or not the killer’s motivation is clear — there’s the specter of Columbine with which to reckon.

But these incidents aren’t all Columbines. Nor are they acts of terrorism. Although these shooting are terrifying, they can’t be labeled as such. What can we call them, other than unrelated tragedies, unfortunate events that we’ll only see through the fishbowls of our TV sets?

The answer is that we can’t label them. And, for the most part, we can’t prevent them. Pittsburgh has received hefty grants to combat terrorism from the Department of Justice, but the cameras’ omniscient eyes haven’t helped us in this respect. Over the past five years, we’ve seen soccer moms turn into security moms, airports into holding cells, but we’re not safer from these kinds of attacks.

Shootings like these are the consequence of myriad forces in our open society. They leave us disgusted with humanity’s ability to destroy itself but feeling powerless to stop them. In reaction to this, we beef up security at courthouses and in churches; pass another law regulating how guns should be stored away from children. With luck, these measures will save lives.

For now, our only sensible reaction is not to believe the hype, not to get caught in the stream of news and views that sensationalizes the bare facts of these crimes. In order to survive, we need to be informed consumers of the news and not settle for glib answers to impossibly difficult questions.