There are no words to express the horror upon hearing of the deaths at Virginia Tech yesterday.  It was and is terrible.  LightGirl can talk of nothing else.  She is horrified.  She wants to know how something like this could happen.  No one knows.

What I am at a loss to explain is Australian prime minister John Howard’s lack of empathy as he used this moment of our grief to his own political gain:

You can never guarantee these things won’t happen again in our country,” Howard told reporters. “We had a terrible incident at Port Arthur, but it is the case that 11 years ago we took action to limit the availability of guns and we showed a national resolve that the gun culture that is such a negative in the United States would never become a negative in our country,” he said.

It was not a gun culture, or gun laws, or even a gun which killed 33 people yesterday.  It was one sad, broken, deranged human being who killed those students and professors.

The much larger and more difficult question we need to be asking and answering is how and what as a culture and community are we doing to contribute to that brokenness?  These shootings are happening with ever greater frequency.  Simply taking away the guns will just change the method that people use to discharge their anger and sadness.  Taking away the guns may reduce the number of victims, but it will do nothing for the underlying cause.

We need to get at the underlying cause if we are truly concerned about healing the problem.  The problem is not that people are dying.  The problem is that sad, broken, deranged people are killing them.  How do we go about making sure that the brokenness doesn’t happen in the first place?  That’s the question to ask and answer.