Why Finding a Motive After Mass Shooting Is So Important
“There is no known motive.” We read this over and over. The police are “searching for a motive.”
Like kids racing across early-morning, damp-with-dew front lawns searching for multi-colored Easter eggs, nowadays it seems like everyone is hunting for a motive.
Why did he do it? He did it because he had mind-blowingly easy access to guns.
Why did he enter the dance hall (the theater, the store, the church, the school, etc.) and open fire? He opened fire because he had criminally-easy access to guns. He did it because this is what we do in the United States.
Does it matter what the motive was?
I don’t care what the goddamn motive was because — and I am going to let anyone who hasn’t already figured this out — there is always going to be a motive to act out violently. As long as humans have been dominating all of the other animals around them, man has made it a point to act out violently against his fellow man.
The need to act out violently is not reserved for humans. The animals we so readily dominate knock the hell out of each other from time to time. Have you ever seen a coral reef up close? On a good…
