I recently started seeing a new psychotherapist and she discussed with me how I try to rationalize the reasons why one might hurt me. It’s true. I find some desire to a reason why someone might cause me to feel hurt or be hurt, and I immediately assume that they must have felt a deep pain at some point in their life. I rationalize this for people that are close to me that hurt me immensely, and also for people that I just hear of hurting other people. I think it’s this desire to humanize another. To hope that we all share some common ground. To maybe try to find a reason to forgive when one inflicts pain, which might help in healing my own wounds.
We all know that with mass shootings in the United States, that there is some fascination with the shooter(s). Who were they? How did they do this? And moreover, why did they do this? Of course, we can never truly understand why, but in the most recent past, it has been for the public to be satisfied with answers of ISIS, mental illness, loner, among others. It’s easy for us to label these as other, as problems and deficiencies that these people had, and I get the sense that one tries to detach any responsibility for.. really.. anything.
With the most recent shooting, there are consistent headlines that express the reason to know why. This is what law enforcement wants to know. This is what everyone else wants to know. Why would you decide to rain down bullets on thousands of celebrating people? Moreover, this person is a white male, successful, connected, and intelligent. It’s hard to find any deficiencies in him. Any reason to fault his own personality.
There is clear reason to blame the ability of one to acquire the means to rain down an endless stream of metal pellets. Is this clarity the reason why the NRA is finally desiring some kind of restriction on guns?
I don’t know where I am going with this. I guess I am just noticing a very inherent desire among myself and society as a whole to try to find out why one can cause so much pain. And in this most recent case, we find ourselves being challenged by the fact that we can no longer judge an action by the individual, but probably have to look at the actions in themselves, and appreciate how horrifying they truly are.