This Seattle Pacific shooting is some eerie stuff. Immediately after I heard about it, I told my landlord about it and her response literally was "What the hell?"

Seattle Pacific University is a very quiet, conservative religious university in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. The university is so quiet and (normally) uneventful that I was pretty unaware of its existence in to my late teen years and my recent trip there was my first real visit there.

It overlooks the Puget Sound and is almost unnoticeable unless you are looking for it - some parts of the campus are literally located in houses. There is graffiti in the area but it is the "Jesus Rules" variety. Here are pictures I took while I was on the campus seven days before that shooting:

This is a good picture from Seattle Times of two students consoling one another (though I will note that the Facebook post of this had an SPU student saying that "the media is hanging out of trees" and, in my personal view, the media is as responsible for this with their constant fear mongering as the people supplying weapons):

I was actually there only the week before. I met with an author who I will respectfully not name in this article out of respect for him and given the subject matter but I will tell you the name of his book - Beauty Will Save The World. The author had had his share of disillusionment, including with the conservative political world, and much of the book is focused on how artistic expression, far from being a source of sin, actually provides salvation for humanity. Bizarrely enough, the subject of discussion was a potential book about trauma and loss and the concept that all of us are defined by what we build and construct in this world versus what others tear down.

It's solid, Christian material and both meeting with him and reading his book was helping me deal with what was a serious clusterfuck in my own life (I know it's strange to curse in the context of religion but how else can I describe it?). Jennifer Reimer's death was the most intense experience of my life - more intense than living in the South Pacific or working at the Heritage Foundation. On top of all that, one of my friends had been at UCSB when that shooter (I refuse to name these people) went crazy - she is a graduate student and three people from her department were hurt or killed.

What the hell does this all mean? A week after I had been at Seattle Pacific, this tragedy occurred. A shooting at SPU of all places really shows some mental illness - a small community of religious devotees like that can be expected to respond just as they did, with a student stopping the killer heroically.

I messaged the professor I had visited and he told me he was away and that his staff was reportedly okay. Initial reports indicated multiple "victims" while later reports indicated only one fatality and others hurt. As one writer here said, we are dealing with an insane society. This isn't normal and this isn't acceptable - there is no point in having a government unless it is purposed with stopping things like this. Without life there is no liberty and no equality either.

I'm not sure what the answers are. There obviously need to be stiffer regulations on firearms acquisition and I think, eventually, there will be. Absent from the debate also is bringing back involuntary commitment. I also think that psychiatric medication needs to be taken out of the commercial sphere - handing out mind altering substances like antidepressants, which often warn of "homicidal and suicidal ideation," liberally in hospitals is extremely dangerous and the implication of such drugs in these tragedies is considerably alarming. All of these blend in to one another and nothing will change until we change it.