Outrage is a comfort for the outraged. Sympathy is comfort for the victim. The dead are beyond comfort, but their survivors aren't. Are there funds set up for PTSD treatment for the children and adults who will go back to that school? Or for grief counseling and treatment for depression for surviving parents? (I can't even imagine...) Are there a local initiatives in our communities that deal with victims' rights or treatment for victims of violent crime that we can contribute to, personally or materially? Placing blame, except on the criminal (not our job -- they have a legal system in Connecticut), is so much easier than finding practical ways to help.

Outrage that focuses on a larger, pre-existing issue takes away from comfort. Furthermore, it doesn't contribute to justice. That takes cooler heads, which are not helped by incendiary outrage.

NPR interviewed a student of murder trends in the United States yesterday. He pointed out that, as horrendous as mass murders are, the number per year over the last 15 years or so has remained stable at about 20 per year. They are relatively rare, even though they capture the public's attention and, with the increased firepower of guns, the death toll is higher. (The largest mass murders committed in this country didn't involve guns. They involved boxcutters, aircraft, and in Oklahoma City, fertilizer, so let's not be naive about cause and effect.)

He pointed out that the real problem is not these horrible anomalies, but the 25,000 individual homicides that occur in the US every year, using knives and hammers and axes and poison and bare hands and pillows... and guns. The trauma from those thousands of individual acts radiates out into our society causing uncounted and unknowable harm, including the continuation of the cycle of violence.

By focusing on guns, and incidentally pointing fingers at a lot of law-abiding people who already feel picked on, including many people I know personally, we avoid the actual problem. We have to find out why we are killing each other in such numbers. The causes are probably many, needing many different steps to stop it, or at least to decrease it substantially.