It was the drugs! No, it was the films! That's what made the poor kid murder nine people--the films! No, wait, the drugs! No, neither--it was the blogs! The blogs and the chat! It was the internet!

Here's a thought: Maybe it was the crazy. Pardon the lack of a technical term, but I'm hardly qualified to diagnose Jeff Weise beyond that.

Can we just for once admit we don't know everything there is to know, not even a tiny fraction of what we need to know, about the crazy? We're as bad as people in the Middle Ages were about the plague. Maybe someday the crazy will also turn out to be caused by something as simple as bacteria; I kind of doubt that, but I'm not ruling it out.

My point is, we're only a tiny step up from sending for the parish priest to perform an exorcism; we still have largely no idea how to fix this level of crazy, the "pardon me I have to go shoot my grandad now" sort of crazy. We have counselors and psychiatrists and psychologists and evaluation teams and social workers and medications and treatment plans and rehabilitation centers--but even with all that, every so often the crazy wins one. And it's always tragic when it does, but scapegoating Prozac, bad films, and chat rooms doesn't get us any closer to fixing the crazy.

The older I get, the more I think Vonnegut had it right in Breakfast of Champions--these tragedies arise from just the right combination of bad ideas and bad chemicals. What I don't think Vonnegut did say (but it's been years since I've read that one, so be nice if I'm wrong) was that the two are related by a variant of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: The more precisely you identify the bad ideas, the less you know about the bad chemicals, and vice versa.

Oh, how I wish the journalistas could be cured of their lust for "the angle." Just write the sad truth: We have no idea why Weise did this and no idea how to prevent anyone else from doing this. Or does that not sell papers or something?