Do We Need to Ask Why?

Yesterday a 25 year old man dressed in black trenchcoat and tall boots, and sporting no less than three illegal firearms, walked into Dawson College in Montreal and started shooting right in front of police officers who were already there. In the process he killed one woman and wounded 19 before police finally ended his life. This event brought to the minds of most Montrealers a similar situation in 1989 in which 14 women student engineers were killed by a woman-hating assailant.

Inevitably the questions come - Could it have been prevented? How can we make sure it never happens again? And always the question Why?

Call me jaded, but events like this, as horrifying as they are, really shouldn't be surprising. To the Why question, we can assume that the poor assailant had a rough childhood or lacked friends or got caught up in the Goth culture or was a sociopath who just wanted to shoot some people once in his life. No doubt we'll find out more about him as time goes on.

But we're missing the real answer to the Why question: We, all of us, are cut off from the One who made us. We've opted for independence and we've become something different from the plan God originally had for us. For some in our midst, the road of independence takes a darker turn, and whatever life experiences that person has had are translated into an urge to kill. But it's a continuum. On the other end is a person who gets cut off in traffic and for a brief second wants to drive his car into the bad driver who needs to be taught a lesson. On the other end are most of you and I, struggling to make it in an often hostile world and not being our best selves.

Given the right circumstances, many of us could have been that gunman. If that doesn't frighten you back to God, probably nothing else would.