Tragedies aren’t new to the American people, but since 1975 – when Charles Whitman purposed himself a sniper on the campus of University of Texas at Austin – gun violence at schools has become more common than presidential elections. Yet we still react with shock, disgust and grief when another story comes on the television.

Last Thursday, a gunman at Northern Illinois University shot and killed six students in a large lecture classroom. Did you know that four other school shootings also happened last week? Ohio, Louisiana, Tennessee and California all grieved in local silence, unheard by the rest of the nation. Five shootings in a week – that averages one unhappy customer per day.

But we really only hear about the incidents that cause larger numbers of deaths or happen at larger institutions. The media has to wade through so much violence to pick out the spectacular, mind-numbing realities that will hit us the hardest.

While watching news coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings last year, I noticed the banality of the situation. When it happened, the news coverage didn’t stop for days, and after the explosion had settled, there was a new update every hour, every day, every week. It was the same breaking news story every time, only further romanticized and full of more unnecessary details to make it seem fresh; always, always, to remind us – as if we had suddenly forgotten.

A proverbial bogeyman has been made of the disturbed man in black bursting into a classroom and opening fire on the innocent children of our higher-learning institutions. The media spends so much effort reminding people to grieve and come together so that the next time there’s a school shooting, people can reflect on that familiar feeling, the right feeling.

If you look closely, you can see the apathy from interviewers toward any real insight from the victims. Those who survive the events are hurried to a camera and asked, “How do you feel?” and “What happened in there?”

The depth of questioning practically floats through newscasts. Attempts by last week’s surviving students to comment on how fearful they were of sitting in classrooms in the future were cut off by a determined Matt Lauer, keeping “The Today Show’s” schedule and the ambience of responses in check.

We feel bad for people who get shot, for people who almost get shot, for people who go to school there, for the parents of victims and parents of students everywhere. Perhaps we feel bad for the parents of the shooter, in an attempt to consider other people. But we never ever give any sympathy to the gunman.

Instead, we try to figure out why he did it. What’s the implication of a geology classroom, no prior criminal record, the fact he wasn’t a current student, a Thursday afternoon, a chicken sandwich for lunch? These helpful investigations inevitably lead to one conclusion: a rational person can’t figure it out. Science and logic give us a pathway, but they fail to answer the question of why it keeps happening.

It happens because these people have problems. The general consensus is that “losers” get tired of being losers and take revenge on what they see as an unjust world. Average people, normal people, can’t seem to grasp the intricate and deperate mindset of someone who would walk into a classroom and shoot people he doesn’t even know well enough to wish harm upon before killing himself.

Think about this for a moment: if your life has lost meaning, if you have lost even the slightest hope of hope and if you feel trapped and forced to settle for never being satisfied or happy – knowing that your entire life will continue this way, you might feel inclined to take a few people with you as you leave.

Why? Most likely because you think you’re going to hell anyway, or you don’t believe in justice on the other side, or what I think is the plague and destructor of minds everywhere: curiosity. Maybe he just wanted to know what it was like to kill another human being before he killed himself.

Maybe he just wanted to assure himself that after killing people, there’s no backpedaling. If you’ve ever struggled with the idea of taking your own life because you didn’t enjoy living it anymore, but felt inexplicably tied to the world anyway, making a choice like that only finalizes the concept of a future not worth facing.

Most of us probably don’t know the victims any more than the shooter did, in all honesty. Who are these people who elicit such a passionate response, a fear that we could be them someday? They are nobody and they are everybody, and in any other theoretical situation, they could be a shooter as well. People are people. I would know – I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

– Luci Van Scoy is a junior in anthropology from Newton