The Colorado Shootings

The tragedy in Colorado presents us with an unsettling pair of developments: the horrible shooting itself and the peculiar way that we try to make sense of it.

It will take awhile to to understand the precise motives and mindset of the shooter--and how the killings intersect with issues such as gun control and our nation's more general culture of violence (as represented, ironically, in blockbuster films of the "Batman" genre).  What is quite clear--though not much talked about--is that such killings are quite rare, that individual gun accidents and shootings and--if we widen our lens to include the rest of world--death from starvation and easily avoidable illnesses kill infinitely more people than mass shootings do and, I think, deserve a much higher fraction of the nation's chronically short attention span.