Society should be on lookout for people with internal rage

No sooner had the wail of sirens replaced the crackle of gunshots Monday than many of us took refuge in a familiar and reflexive question: Who’s to blame for not preventing this?

The people who sometimes do have the power to prevent the unimaginable are a far more prosaic lot: doctors and pharmaceutical researchers and mental health workers who deal as best they can with the cases, the medical challenges, that they confront.

But that sort of explanation doesn’t fulfill our desire for pat answers. We like our potential serial killers easy to identify, like the criminals we meet in TV crime dramas who live in dark apartments and mutter to their goldfish. Why, we demand to know, didn’t somebody at Virginia Tech stop this guy?

This impractical craving for precise preventions now has a nation parsing, of all things, campus protocols for e-mail notifications. Better we ask ourselves this: What is more transient, more free, more untethered in our society than a young person roaming the grounds of a huge university?

From there we can proceed to more fruitful pursuits: How can we be on the lookout for ? and get help for ? people around us whose internal rages make them likely to hurt someone else?