We have read this sort of headline before.

Gunman who killed 8, himself at Omaha mall had lost job, girlfriend, home

The subtext fairly screams at us: ‘The reason Robert Hawkins walked into Westroads Mall and shot to death 8 persons was because he had a run of bad luck.’

Wrong. The reason the fellow murdered was because he was evil.

He was certainly not insane. He chose that particular mall because the good folks who run the place had banned handguns. Hawkins knew this. Those at the mall knew this. They hoped their luck would hold on that day. It did not.

And if you need a subtext for the ‘handguns banned’ sign, here is one: ‘Handguns are banned here. We know that you law abiding types will obey. We also know you non law abiding types will not obey. We wish the law abiding types best wishes and many good lucks.’

Hawkins was thorough and prepared—not common characteristics among the insane.

Armed with a rifle, he went to the sprawling Westroads Mall, filled with shoppers three weeks before Christmas. The Omaha World-Herald reported that the gunman had a military-style haircut and a black backpack, and wore a camouflage vest.

Witnesses said the gunman fired down on shoppers from a third-floor balcony of the Von Maur store.

The usual types from the usual mental health swamps will now emerge from their dens and begin to pontificate about guns and depression and unhappy childhoods and more money for health care and such.

All silly. All a waste of time.

Men like Hawkins have been with us since Cain. They will be with us until The 2nd Coming. There is nothing to do about them except kill them when they arise and bury those they kill.

At least Hawkins spared us a trial. An earthly one, that is.

(Update: More here.)

As a mere boy I would wonder into my grandparents’ bedroom to marvel at the number of pill bottles on their dresser. There were dozens of them. It seemed to me that they lived on them. And the talk around their home always got back to their illnesses and ailments. There was the diabetes, the numerous heart conditions, their inability to lose weight, their blood pressures, their arthritis, their many stomach pains—all of which were treated more or less through the use of all those pills.

I have no idea if the medicines helped or not. They both died at reasonable ages in their 70s, so perhaps they did. But then their final ten years of life were not what I would call ‘living.’ Bedridden much of the time, walking so frustratingly slowly when not, always bemoaning this pain or that pain, outliving most of their friends, having little to do during the day other than stare at the television: perhaps they would lay in bed and wonder what the point of all that was.

They answered their own question by committing suicide, he with a pistol, she a few months later by starving herself to death.

I was doing a walkabout in Peru (1986-87) during all that, and the news got to me months later. I do not remember being shocked or even surprised.

After I returned home my mother revealed to me some news about my biological father. I never met him. All I knew was that he was a Mexican. I found out that he shot himself before I was born. I was shown an old faded photograph of him. He sure looked like me. Or I looked like him.

Two years ago I got a call from a sister-in-law who lives here in Oklahoma. One of my brothers was in a psychiatric hospital because he had tried to kill himself. His method was to place a rubber hose from the exhaust pipe of his truck into its cab and just await events. He was found in time. Perhaps it was his intention to be discovered, but who knows?

Mental health professionals and assorted mystics, fortune tellers, tarot card readers and alchemists have made careers and fortunes speculating upon why some of us have this ghastly urge to self-destruction. The combined answers of all these Pooh-Bahs are less than helpful. In fact they are all over the place. There is no common element among suicides except that their condition might—just might —run in families. Hemmingway is one example of this phenomenon.

This definition does not at all help:

Suicide occurs for a number of reasons such as depression, substance abuse, shame, avoiding pain, financial difficulties or other undesirable situations.

All this really says is that suicide happens. It covers every possible cause and every possible human condition. There is scarcely a man among us who escapes these conditions along the course of his life. Abraham Lincoln suffered most or all of them, as did Generals Grant and Sherman.

The one answer that makes any sense to the question of why some end their lives and why some do not is, “We do not know.”

The Catholic Church has some strong words about it.

That suicide is unlawful is the teaching of Holy Scripture and of the Church, which condemns the act as a most atrocious crime and, in hatred of the sin and to arouse the horror of its children, denies the suicide Christian burial. Moreover, suicide is directly opposed to the most powerful and invincible tendency of every creature and especially of man, the preservation of life. Finally, for a sane man deliberately to take his own life, he must, as a general rule, first have annihilated in himself all that he possessed of spiritual life, since suicide is in absolute contradiction to everything that the Christian religion teaches us as to the end and object of life and, except in cases of insanity, is usually the natural termination of a life of disorder, weakness, and cowardice.

Perhaps the real cause of suicide is a simple denial of God’s existence. For as Dostoyevsky wrote, “If God does not exist then all is permissible.”

Even—especially perhaps—suicide. It is a man’s final yelp at a universe that has become incomprehensible to him. In a last gasp of existentialist fury at the meaninglessness he imagines all about, he does what he thinks is the only real act he can freely do.

The suicide had received the gift of life, but his response is scrawl upon it, ‘Return to Sender.’