I've been thinking about Friday's movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, and I can't help but wonder how it will be remembered. Specifically, I wonder how the gunman will be known when people look back on this event in history. I assume he will just be written off as a crazy person without any reason or logic to his behavior. I agree that, whatever reason he had in his head, it is completely unjustifiable. There is a severe dearth of logic with someone that does something like this. However, we should always critically think about these tragedies more than we do. I do not know if there is a "why" behind this event, but there are a few reasons that should at least be considered. (Note that blaming the media, art, entertainment, etc. for peoples' behavior is not what I am suggesting. Such allegations are naive, irrelevant, and distract from substantial conversation on this topic. I could talk ad nauseam about falsely attributing behavior to media, especially alleged connections between violent behavior and entertainment media, but that shall be for another post.)

At this point, there isn't a lot of information on the suspect, his motivation, and his background. A few people who have known him say he kept to himself and was "socially inept." He also worked very hard academically and was a doctoral student until dropping out a couple months ago.

First of all, let me illustrate a distinction I make between two types of mass murderers. (I stress that I am not an expert in psychology or criminal behavior; these are simply my observations.) When people say the words "psycho" or "psychopathic," I think of psychopathy in the psychiatric sense: a person devoid of sensitivity or care of other people, someone socially detached and unafraid of consequences. A psychopath lacks the mental characteristic commonly referred to as a conscious. Not all psychopaths become mass murderers, but it is easy to see how someone who wants to kill would have no trouble doing so if he/she is a psychopath. The other type of person I think could be a mass murderer is someone who does not necessarily have a psychiatric predisposition to seeing other people as disposable. Rather, this type of person is pushed to insanity by factors in his/her life such as upbringing, treatment by peers, social isolation, etc. This would be a person who loses sense of reality and human connection due to specific events or general life patterns. Compare this to a psychopath who is born this way. In other words, I think insanity can be caused by both nature or nurture depending on the person.

Again, not much is known about James Holmes at this point. However, if my distinction between two types of killers is correct, let's assume Holmes may be the latter kind—not a "psychopath," but rather someone who traveled to the brink of sanity because of an unfortunate life. If my hypothesis is right about a person transforming into a kind of personality that is capable of killing, this transformation is preventable. Of course everyone grows up differently. And it is hard to draw parallels between murderers who seemingly act without logic. But perhaps they did not have to be that way. Perhaps Holmes was not destined to walk into that theater and murder innocent people. If his life had been different, maybe he would not have committed such a terrible crime. Going insane is not an easy process to detect, track, and find the cause of. But I believe we should start talking about this more to hopefully find patterns that can be broken.

I think people are afraid of looking for reasons for horrible occurrences because they don't want to seem like they are a) sympathizing with the perpetrator; b) finding an explanation for the act that is anything but the fault of the perpetrator; c) blaming innocent people for the actions of a criminal. This taboo is not useful. I am not saying that all murders can be explained or that there is some unifying reason for why people do horrible deeds. Maybe they are all just crazy people who are born to be evil. I don't claim to know one way or the other. But if what happened at that movie theater, if what happened inside James Holmes' mind, is part of a larger problem, it would be an awful shame for the world to cast it off as an anomaly and possibly miss the chance to prevent similar catastrophes from happening. Labeling a person as the enemy is easy. Seeing the world from their eyes and possibly understanding how they think, that's harder. It's even scary to think about. But I think it must be done if we want these nightmares to disappear.