I know people mean well and passions can sweep folks up. We can think we are doing the right thing, passing out the right information, and in our zealot energy to educate and inform people we can give out false information. Sometimes we need to take a moment, pause and reflect before we act. The instant communication we can have with social media can make us put out a statement before we have all the facts. Use the other part of the Internet, search engines, to verify information.

A few readers have noticed I've only put out one article on the Colorado shooting. It's not that I don't have a lot to say, or that I'm doing this out of respect for the families who lost loved ones. I watched the events unfold off of a live feed from a local station. It was around 2pm our time and I watched or listened until 7am. It was chaos time and there wasn't a lot of good information coming out but the news had to fill up time. Some information given out was bound to change because of the nature of the tragedy. Of course the dead and injured numbers were going to change. Eyewitness reports were going to be massaged because reporters were trying to confirm information with people who were in shock.

One stupid thing that happened was ABC stating, once the name was released, that the gunman was part of the Tea Party. It was a mistake but an avoidable one. I know because once the name was given I did the same thing I'm sure many reporters did; I checked social media for the person. The police had already confirmed he was around 24-25 years old, so when I saw a link to a man who was in his 30s, he was dismissed. The same for the couple of black men I saw with the same name. There was someone who matched the age of the gunman, but when I saw he had pictures with his girlfriend, I discounted him on that one thing. If he had a girlfriend, unless he broke up within a few days, he wouldn't be the shooter. The planning that was described by reports at the time suggested something that had been worked on for months, not days or weeks.

So I was able to discount a Tea Party member found on the web because he was the wrong age while a highly respected news organization initially pegged him as the shooter. I can see where people who have little training can make mistakes in information, but when that information is passed off as fact, it can influence their friends and others because of the status of the Internet.

I know it seems odd that I want to stay out of the discussion but as time has gone on too many things about this event have been colored by emotions more than facts. The constant debate about guns laws has left me frustrated. All people are doing right now is giving lip service to the issue. No ones is changing their minds or really having a thoughtful, meaningful discussion about the availability of guns, of mental health and of ways to prevent the tragedy in the future. People are looking for quick answers, for scapegoats and for assurances that they will be protected. We don't like in a Philip K Dick society. We don't have a minority report. We don't have pre-cogs, thought police or psicops. We can't do the measures we need to make the society safe, not at the level of conversation people are willing to dig into.

Yesterday I read a story about a shooting in Florida. The man was known as the neighborhood grouch, the blueprint of the 'stay off my lawn' old guy. He was so infamous in the neighborhood that the police warning to neighbors was to avoid him and to make sure kids didn't go into his lawn. The police suspected he was unstable but legally couldn't do anything, according to the story. A young traveling salesman went to the house to sell steaks. The man wasn't home but as the salesman left the guy drove into the driveway. The man asked the salesman why he was there, the salesman said he was selling steaks, and the homeowner shot the salesman in the leg. The man then walked behind the salesman and shot him in the back of the head. When police arrived, the man claimed he shot the salesman because he trespassed on his property, and yes the man did have no trespassing signs on his lawn.

What got me a bit worked up to write this article was I read where some folks were upset that NBC was covering shooting at the Olympics and why would they do this after the tragedy in Colorado. Some were advocating boycott of the network. My question would be what would that do? There are competition for archery, javelin and marksmanship in the Olympics. Folks are looking for quick fixes to something that isn't that easy to correct. The shooter in Colorado got his guns, ammunition and tactical gear legally. The homeowner in Florida got his arms legally yet he was known as a threat by police and the neighbors. What law would have prevented both from happening? What measures could have predicted both men would snap? Even if you could come up with an answer for those two, you would have to figure out how those laws and procedures could have stopped a career criminal from killing a local coach, or why, going back to Florida, would a woman protecting herself with a gun by shooting in the air to scare her abusive ex-husband from beating her, used Stand Your Ground as a defense but was sentenced to 20 years in jail while another person in Florida killed a kid with candy and soda and people are confused about if that was right or not?

We have to stop thinking of all these separate incidents can be fixed with a cookie cutter answer. We have to break away from assigning blame to someone or something and really work on solutions to the issue. The thing is we won't do that. Too many sides put too much emotions and power into the mix. They worry about winning points than working on a solution to the problem. Spinning wheels and making smoke does nothing and we will continue to get senseless shooting of single individuals, mass killings and suicides until we really decide we want to take the issue head on.