I have a number of...well, now acquaintances who went to Virginia Tech. I've been to a handful of their football games, and a couple of parties, and they are by and large cool dudes. Isn't Atlanta's "star" quarterback from VaTech too?

What on earth happened there early this morning? A masked gunman storms two specific buildings on the campus and shoots 50 people, killing 31? Um, that’s a lot of ammunition. Officials state that he only had a 9 mm and a 22. Students are asking the right question: why was there a two hour time period between the first set of gunfire and the second? Was it really only one guy? Why wasn’t he found faster? Did he kill himself or did the cops take care of that?

Simply, though….there are 50 people whose lives will never be the same. 31 whose lives will be no more. Families and friends who will grieve and mourn their unexpected and certainly never anticipated losses. The path not taken now taken as a matter of course rather than as a free decision.

What was going on in that man’s head? What makes you take a life? What makes you take 31? How do you justify that to yourself?

There are of course precedents for this in our history: Charles Whitman (the bell tower killings) being a perfect example. He was justifiably bonkers. He was a moral, psychotic man who one day just snapped.

What about this kid? Was this just another disaffected student struggling with his identity? Was this a bad breakup gone horridly awry? Was it a terrorist attack, as some pundits have suggested (really, who wants to attack VaTech? I can think of several more prominent and meaningful targets)? How did this fellow get to the absolute rock bottom…that the only way for justice was sighting and squeezing? What goes through your mind?

We’ll never know; I think even if we found a way to know, it wouldn’t satisfy any need we have for knowledge, answers, or justice. Does it matter to the dead why he did it? No, it doesn’t. It matters to the people who remain, and those are answers we’ll never have.