Bursting through a consequentialist hedge, with the most lethal weapons he can find, does the madman come.
Three dozen murders at a premier university, Virginia Polytechnic Institute: that can't be ignored by the sensible mind. To appreciate the event, however, isn't necessarily to understand it. When pallbearers are called for unexpectedly, and because of something atrocious, philosophy is naturally taken to, as well — but possibly as a compulsion, even an indulgence. The question to be resisted, unless one means to give succinct, narrow answers, is that which begins with the word "why."
An affluent South Korean; decadal resident alien; bright enough to study, abroad, literature in another language — the murderer? Well, he wasn't thinking like most of us. Malice can be explained, or repressed, as readily as hunger. Mass shootings committed by youths, a modern phenomenon, are the work of the same temperament that has always been responsible for acts of cold blood.
That the pleasure in harm is widely incomprehensible should brace, not bewilder. The record of the crime is now under the weight of condemnation, the names of the dead announced, witnesses expounding with portraits of heroism in those spare moments. Eudaemonia is thataway; here, savagery is called wrong, and that is the best we can do.