Editorial: Despite our best efforts, violence finds a way

Senseless violence, innocent victims, the nation grieves.

This is a nightmarishly familiar scenario. The latest was played out in a Colorado movie theater at the midnight premiere of a film about comic-book heroes and villains. And it has started the all-too-familiar search to find out why it happened and what can be done to stop the next loner with a gun.

The answers, as always, will be familiar and, as always, exasperating. We will never know what brings someone like James Holmes to madness. We will not be able to prevent an attack by the next lunatic with a living room full of ammo.

As in "The Dark Knight Rises," the moral is simple; the message, eternal. There is good and evil, right and wrong. The script does not change.

Rationalize and deliberate all we want, we cannot stop random events. We will examine motivation. We will search for patterns of behavior. We will think about what laws should be changed. We will focus on our mental health safety net, to make sure it is woven as tightly as it needs to be. And then the next gunman will open fire.

We will always argue about what should be done. It's a collective and necessary process to make us feel we can control random events, that we can thwart the endless threat of evil.

There will be calls for more control of guns, and certainly taking the weapons out of the hands of some will save lives. But guns will always be present. The Supreme Court has interpreted the Second Amendment to allow ownership of guns in our homes to protect ourselves. We can regulate who can carry a weapon and when -- and we should.

But Holmes was a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at the University of Colorado. On what grounds would he have been denied the right to buy and carry a gun? Besides the Glocks and the rifles, he had enough explosives in his apartment to take out an entire housing complex.

What we have learned is that there will always be extreme violence. In 1927, an angry school board official blew up a three-story schoolhouse in Bath, Mich., killing 45, including 38 children. In 1966, a University of Texas student climbed the campus clock tower, mowed down 16 people and wounded 32 others.

The latest cycle of horror began 33 years later when two Columbine High School students shot and killed a teacher and 12 schoolmates and wounded 21 more in Littleton, Colo. Three years later, a sniper day after day killed 10 people in a series of shootings that terrified the region of Washington, D.C.

We were outraged again in 2007 after the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman occurred at Virginia Tech. A student's rampage killed 32 people and wounded 15 before the man, who was mentally ill and should not have been enrolled, turned the gun on himself. Since Columbine, there have been 28 mass shootings in the United States. Before Aurora, it was in Tuscon, Ariz., where six were killed and 12 wounded, including then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

While the frequency in our country is frightening, we are not alone. Less than a year ago, a 32-year-old Norwegian man, in a nation that prides itself on having some of the strictest gun-control laws in the world, killed 91 people. The first seven were with a bomb, before he gunned down another 84 people at a youth summer camp on an island.

We mourn the dead of Aurora and comfort the wounded. We pray for them and for ourselves. We are a violent nation, fixated on violence.

And we come to understand that the question no longer is how to find the answer. It is how to live without one.