I hate to be the bearer of more bad news, but there is a meme that occurs with mass shootings and I think it is one that needs to be laid to rest.

Put simply, there are no warning signs.

None. I know that when these things occur, the media likes to take a look at the killer’s personal life (very easy in this share-everything world) and try to find clues leading to an answer to the question “Why did he do it?”

And from this position of hindsight, it is easy to point at various things from a killer’s life and say “Look at that! That was a clear warning sign! Somebody should have done something. The system let this happen!”

And to a certain extend, that is true. We can talk about failures of a mental health system that ignores potentially dangerous young men (it’s always men) cring out for care and being told “Sorry, we can’t help you because you haven’t done anything. Yet. We can talk about a criminal justice system that also can’t do anything until a crime is committed. And we can talk about the societal pressures that lead to this kind of madness.

But none of those thing matter when we address the subject of “warning signs”.

Sure, the shooters tend to post violent Youtube videos saying they are going to “do something”. They usually have withdrawn from family and friends and show signs of mental illness. They even go and buy guns and ammo in large quantities.

But so do a lot of other people who never shoot anyone.

So these supposed “warning signs” are useless for stopping the next Borque. Until he went on his rampage, he was just another crazy loner on the Internet talking about “doing something”. There is no way for anyone to know which of these nutcases are actually going to do it. For every Borque there is thousands of people who look and talk exactly like him.

So unless we want to rip a giant hole in freedom by making it illegal to talk about something that sort of sounds like you might do something horrible, there is no way to stop these extremely damaged young men before they commit their crimes.

Gun control might help. Gun anarchists insist that if people like Borque didn’t have guns, they would just use knives. But it is a lot harder to kill a lot of people in a short time with a knife. People can just run away from a knife assailant and unless the assailant is very fast, there’s nothing he can do about it. It’s way easier for someone to tackle a person with a knife and wrest it away from him. And with a gun, you have to get up close and personal, which is very messy and puts the assailant within arms-length of their victim in order to hurt them and thus put themselves at physical risk.

That is a whole different ballgame from just mowing people down with an assault rifle from a safe distance.

Not that I am advocating taking guns away from law-abiding citizens. You can’t restrict the freedom of all to catch the very rare person who, in hindsight, we wish hadn’t had a gun.

I am just saying that the “knife” argument is stupid.

So gun control of some sort might help. Certainly, background checks to see if someone is crazy before we sell them a gun seems entirely reasonable. So does restricting the sales of weapons that can kill a room full of people in ten seconds.

Early intervention might be possible. We don’t have forced commitment any more (thank God) so we can’t just lock someone up for talking crazy. But mental health outreach might be able to get to this kind of person and offer them another way out.

But the hard cold truth is that there is probably absolutely nothing we can do to keep these things from ever happening again. These are isolated incidents that are, from the point of view of society and the authorities, completely unpredictable.

We accomplish nothing by hashing and rehashing “warning signs” that apply to thousand of people. I know that we want to answer that burning question of “why did he do it?”, but the real answer to that question is as simple as it is depressing.

Why did he do it? Because he’s crazy.

That’s it. That is the entire answer. There is no other cause. This isn’t the result of something preventable. We don’t need to pour through the guts of this story to find the “real answer”.

He did it because he’s crazy. End of story.

On a personal note for you wonderful people who have read this far, I grew up in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, which was just a ferry ride away from Moncton. I am also an Acadian, and Moncton is the closest thing us Acadians have to a capital city. I have visited Moncton many times, and always liked it there.

So the Borque tragedy hits very close to home for me, both literally and emotionally. The Maritimes (Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia) might not always be the most exciting of places, but it is extremely safe. My home province averages about one murder per decade. The worst crime is usually the usual drunken brawls that happen everywhere they sell booze and attract a lot of young men.

When I first heard of the tragedy, my first thought was “MONCTON? Really?”. I just couldn’t believe it was true. Like everyone else who doesn’t live in a big city, we Maritimers tend to think that is the sort of thing that happens somewhere else, down in the States where everyone is crazy anyhow.

But these things are too unpredictable to make that kind of assumption. It really can happen anywhere. Anywhere they are disaffected young men with access to firearms who choose to go down a very dark and self-destructive road of isolation and anger, there is a chance this kind of thing will happen.

The good news is that these events are exceedingly rare. They are incredibly frightening, but you are probably more likely to win the Lotto than you are to be a victim of this kind of violence.

We need to just accept that there is no way of stopping these men after they have the guns.

Our only hope is to hear their cries for help, and respond.

Talk to you tomorrow, folks!