I loved this column.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, several years ago my close family friend (during my teen years, she was in my parents' will as guardian in the event that they both died at the same time) was murdered by three teenaged boys. What struck me then, what strikes me now, is how stupid, how pointless, evil is. It makes no sense. Nothing you can do to it in your mind will make it make sense. I read the psych reports, I sifted through the police interviews, I stared into the faces of the killers at the trial. I even, briefly, spoke with one of them. And still nothing makes sense, because there is no sense to be made. Eventually I filed the whole experience under "Seriously Fucked Up," stuck the folder in the back of the cabinet of my mind, and returned as best I could to business as usual. I think Cary's captured the essence of what it feels like to be confronted by senseless violence.

However, even in the land of the senseless, some things do make sense.

In the case of my murdered friend, the three boys who killed her were horribly abused as children. Robert Carpenter's father, Robert Carpenter senior, punished him when he was a boy for some minor infraction by pouring lighter fluid on the five-year-old child and setting him on fire. At the emergency room, the senior Carpenter claimed he saw nothing wrong with his actions. For reasons which are opaque now due to the death of the officer who filed the police report, he wasn't charged with a crime. I can't remember whether it was Robert or his brother's trial - there were three killers, and both state and federal charges, so all the trials blur together now - but during the sentencing phase of one of the trials the boys' mother was summoned to testify about the circumstances under which her sons grew up. She didn't bother coming to court. The look on that young man's face when he turned with hope in his eyes to see his mother and then slowly realized his own mother didn't care enough to speak in his defense made me almost feel sorry for him.

So. Out of nonsense, something that makes sense: setting children on fire is bad. It has repercussions. Five-year-olds who are set on fire may grow up to kill innocent people.

In Cho's case, there are also a couple of things that make sense. Untreated mental illness isn't good. A guy who everyone was aware was mentally ill, who was found by mental health professionals to have been dangerous to himself (if not to others), should really have been compelled to get treatment. Or at least it should have been easier to keep him away from handguns and classrooms full of people.

It's very difficult to involuntarily commit someone in America at the moment. My own half-sister is losing her mind; so far, she has set her neighbor's house on fire, called the police because she was convinced there were people living in her attic, and threatened to drive cross-country and murder my mother. We're not having a lot of luck getting her treatment; she doesn't think there's a problem, and the authorities aren't all that interested. At the moment, all we can do is cross our fingers and pray that if she ever does decide to carry out her threats, her car breaks down en route. It's hard to keep in mind that her actions are caused by illness. My mother, in particular, is having a hard time believing that she's ill, not just evil.

My half-sister's situation is not unusual. It's unfortunate but true that as a result of the policy of deinstitutionalization, mentally people who are violent are walking the streets. Given that, it's not surprising that many people are afraid of the insane.

If I remember correctly, schizoaffective disorder isn't likely to make anyone commit murder. But the average person doesn't know a paranoid schizophrenic from a schizotypal or a disorder from a psychosis. For the average person, all mental illness can be summed up by the word "crazy," and the stereotype of "crazy people" is determined by whatever is reported most loudly in the news. It sucks, and I'm sorry about that.

LW - Take heart, though. Unless you wear a sticker on your forehead that says, Schizoaffective, no one will know except those close to you, and you can explain to them what exactly it means. You won't necessarily succeed in convincing others that your illness, and not you, was responsible for you behavior in the past. We humans like to cling to the illusion that we are masters of our own minds. Insanity, intoxication, senility, anything that reminds us that we aren't completely in charge, these scare us.

As for being afraid of the mentally ill - it's true, there are some mentally ill people who commit murder. But there are also non-mentally-ill people who commit murder. In fact, the majority of murders are committed by people who are NOT mentally ill.

We can try to second-guess Cho. We can lock up unstable people in hopes of preventing the next massacre. But the fact is, as Cary beautifully pointed out, we can't make our lives safe. The next mass murderer might be someone with no prior history of mental illness. The one that gets you is the one you never saw coming.