This is the Creator, tattered and torn,

That made the parents all forlorn,

That made the shooter, mentally shorn,

That fired the gun that scorned

The laws . . . that

Even a child’s nursery rhyme  (see “The House that Jack Built” https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/type2035.html) comprehends that events have multiple causes. We need an adult nursery rhyme (like the one I wrote above) to remind and caution us about that.

The understandable response to a school shooting, or any mass shooting, is to isolate a single cause and rant about that for a week or more. The Post-Dispatch easily slipped into that trap on Monday, when they quickly editorialized about “gun-rights lunacy” in the state of Missouri. They weren’t wrong, but they were using the tragedy to target their pet peeve.

Predictably the NRA will react and talk about mental health problems that turn guns into weapons of terror.

Predictably the mental health advocacy groups will respond that this puts the blame on a whole class of people and absolves the gun lobby of their role in selling deadly weapons to teenagers.

Predictably the responsible gun owners will demand better training around gun ownership . . . and so on.

Is it possible that all of these interests are partially accurate about the causes of Monday’s shooting at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School in south St. Louis?

Thank goodness we don’t have an easy scapegoat like the blundering local police in Uvalde, Texas. Immediately that removes responsibility from all the other likely causes of carnage. Did they forget the accessibility of semi-automatic weapons in this incident? Did they ask what mental health resources were not ready to capture the young man in their safety net?

If we start with the assumption that multiple causes will have to be addressed, maybe we don’t turn one of them into the scapegoat for our anger. Maybe we can prevent every interested agency from circling the wagons before the actual causes have been identified. Maybe every interested party might ask, what can we do?

We shouldn’t be subject to lobbyists and politicians pointing fingers at causes that attack our cherished interest. We should all be lining up to say, we know we have contributed to the problem, how can we contribute to the solution? We can ask this question before the real contributing factors have even been identified. Eventually we will have a combination of causes we can all address.

But it requires a willingness to shoulder responsibility, not a reflex defensiveness.  It requires a openness to self-evaluation, not an automatic blaming of other causes. It requires an agreement to accept reasonable solutions that engage multiple problems, some involving our own responsibility.

Before we even know the actual causes of Monday’s tragedy, could we agree to find multiple solutions?