The past 48 hours has been non-stop speculation, accusation and recrimination. On all sides of the Colorado shooting people have given pop-psychology cookie cutter responses to what occurred. There have been stories about what to tell your kids about the shooting, what goes on in the mind of a psychopath, the inevitable question about gun laws, new security measures at theaters and other fill in the blank tragedy coverage.

So far, I think the best explanation about why this event happened was given by criminal profiler and author Pat Brown, She said in an interview she had to write a number of books before she got a page on Wikipedia. The alleged killer, who seems to have had no Internet footprint before the shooting, now has a Wikipedia entry. In less than 24 hours he went from nobody to criminal celebrity.

My wish is, and I have to keep it in the realm of a wish because I know this will never happen, that the media and people in general stop trying to put labels on incidents such as these. People want a formula, some sort of roadmap that will make some sort of sense out the tragedy. We get stories about how we talk about this to our kids or how we protect ourselves in a theater when in reality there isn’t a lot we can do in those cases. I heard on a radio talk show this morning where a gun advocate said if people were able to carry guns in the theater they could have taken the person out. The same suggestion was made by a local gun advocate on a local news show. Both people who made the comment had the same information everyone else had. We knew at the time the gunman was decked out in tactical gear, used smoke canisters as a distraction and he was doing this in a darkened theater with the only light coming from the screen. There is no amount of training that is going to allow someone to be able to focus enough and take out someone in tactical gear in those conditions, but these two people spoke from the gun lobby playbook like parrots.

I’m not just singling out the gun people. All around statements have been made that make this and other shooting incidents seem like some playbook that is easy to defend against. They aren’t. The Gifford shooting, the Columbine shooting, this shooting and the shootings that will come well beyond this are going to be different. Extra security isn’t going to help, stricter gun laws aren’t going to help. Approaching this from a ‘one size fits all’ stance only serves to give a false sense of hope and security when a broader and maybe even a radical approach is needed.

My biggest issue in this whole incident has been calling the shooter crazy. Crazy would be someone getting upset with the slow pace of getting their food, pulling out a gun and shooting up a place. If we are to believe the reports, this man rigged up his apartment with a booby trap and what was supposed to happen was when he left, he allowed techno music to play very load. The neighbors were supposed to complain, either by banging on the door or for them to call the police and have them bang on the door. The room was rigged to explode if the door was messed with, which would cause first responders to come on the scene. While this was happening he would be at the movie theater shooting up the place. It was a two prong attack meant to cause a lot of damage and loss of life in two areas and allow for a divided police response. You have the guy who had planning enough to buy a ticket, in Joker makeup (or at least dyed hair) who left the theater through a side entrance and left the door ajar, went and got on tactical gear and re-entered the theater with gas canisters and guns.

People may want to comfort themselves and say he was crazy, but that isn’t crazy thinking, not by a long shot. That’s planning and that is what is dangerous about something like this.

I know we want to have answers and we want answers that are simple, that are reassuring but in some cases the simple answers don’t apply. The plug in pop psychology doesn’t fit the reality of the situation. We can’t just chalk this up to bad gun laws, lax security or any other of the standard answers. We have to brush aside those urges and really dig deep in analyzing the situation or we will continue to have situations like this that end with posturing and band-aid measures rather than prevention.