Amoklauf at Walmart

Investigators in El Paso are hoping to learn the motive behind today's slaughter of 20 people in a local Walmart, and the wounding of many others, from both alleged online writings of the shooter and interviews with the shooter himself, who reportedly surrendered to police without a fight. Words are merely rationalizations, however; all that really matters is that this person felt entitled to mass murder. You can believe any garbage you please without feeling such an entitlement. Not everyone learns the desire to kill from books or sermons or online ravings. Some no doubt turn to ideology or religion simply to find an excuse that fits their mood. It remains all too easy for people like this, whatever their beliefs, to kill others. Neither left nor right has the answer for this murderous sense of entitlement. The actual ideologues on both sides no doubt sincerely deplore the senseless sort of violence we've seen today; some actually may believe that specific people or sorts of people should die, but randomly motivated violence, as this most likely was, serves no purpose for them. There is, of course, an ideological predisposition on one side against limiting the ability of degenerates like the latest shooter to kill by limiting the availability of many firearms, just as there's an unjustified optimism on the other that greater gun control will end mass murder. There are also persistent assumptions that old forms of mental or emotional discipline will overcome this murderous sense of entitlement, as well as theories that eliminating certain "dehumanizing" stimuli will abort the murderous impulse. But the impulse to commit mass murder probably predates all philosophies and religions and pop culture. Yet the impulse seems stronger in our time, and not just in the gun-happy U.S. as various bladed rampages in Asia attest. City and state officials in El Paso are calling on the people to unite after today's atrocity, though they were predictably reticent about addressing the problems of gun violence and mass murder specifically. If people are to unite for a solution, however, they must be willing to address all possible solutions, or else the coming together will be merely a show. It's hard, after all -- or it should be -- to imagine a solution worse than this problem. The suspicion that some solutions might be worse may be as much a problem, if not as great a danger, as the entitlement to kill.