Joe Quinn and Niall Bradley: The Sandy Hook Massacre.

Unanswered questions. "Truth wears no mask, bows at no human shrine, seeks neither place, not applause, she only asks a hearing." Carl A Wickland. When 20 children and 8 adults were murdered in the tiny Connecticut community of Sandy Hook, we, like most other people, were shocked and horrified at what appeared to be a series of senseless acts of brutality. When a person experiences the tragic and untimely loss of a loved one, particularly in unusual or apparently inexplicable circumstances, the initial intense feelings of grief usually give way to a desire to understand How and Why the tragedy occurred, in an effort to make sense of it, and achieve some kind of closure. This is a very normal and natural human reaction. We have an innate need to understand the world us, and how things work. In our modern technological world, most of what we understand about our world and how it works, is provided to us by some authority or other, and most of us accept the conclusions of those authorities as being true. In some cases, those explanations are true. In relation to the Sandy Hook massacre,while the HOW of the attack has been explained, as yet, there seem to be few authoritative answers as to why the massacre occurred. That is to say, why a lone gunman decided to walk into a school and murder 20 children and 6 adults. At this point, three weeks after the event, it seems that the world will ultimately have to accept the narrative that a lone, disturbed individual murdered those children because he was, well, disturbed. Specifically, it is claimed that Lanza had 'Asperger's Syndrome', yet according to experts, people with this condition do not run the risk of killing others or themselves, and indeed that they 'rarely harm others'. The 'disturbed individual' is, therefore, a rather unsatisfactory one, but it's an answer nonetheless. But here's a question: What if the explanation provided by authorities about how something happened doesn't make sense in any truly objective way? More to the point, what if you have reasonable cause to suspect that the official version of events may not be accurate? Logically, you'd think that the same desire to make sense of the tragedy, and find closure, would remain unsatisfied in such a case. But you'd be wrong to think so, because it seems that most people, particularly those affected most directly by a tragedy, will gratefully accept the first plausible official explanation that is offered to them, even if, as in the case of the Sandy Hook massacre, it doesn't explain Why the tragedy occurred. The reason that most people react in this way, is probably due to the same desire to find closure and 'put it behind them'.