Whenever there's a shooting like the one yesterday, when the news is first coming in, I think a lot of people kind of hold their breath and think "please don't let the person who did this be someone like me." If you're a Tea Party activist, you don't want a Tea Party radical to be behind this. If you're a liberal, you don't want some liberal extremist behind it. If you're a sad, lonely kid who dresses in black and listens to weird music, you don't want another Columbine.

And there's the other side to this to. In the hours after the shooting, a lot of liberals were jumping to the (somewhat understandable) conclusion that this was a political shooting. That the person behind this WAS a Tea Party radical. If that had been the case, it would have played to their political advantage. It would have validated a lot of liberal concerns about Tea Party rhetoric and code words like "Second Amendment Solutions."

And it would have been wrong.

I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's talk about this case. The best evidence so far suggests that the shooter was just a mentally ill kid. If you find his YouTube page, you'll find a video that outlines his incoherent philosophy, conveyed with grammar and a wavering grasp of logical argument. (The kid makes bizarre use of "If > Then" constructions.)

As a non-mental health professional, this certainly looks to me like someone who's either mentally ill or perhaps doing a LOT of drugs. In either case, it's a tragedy that there was no one to reach out to this kid and get him on the right path.

It's too soon to excuse him of any moral culpability, but from the little I've seen, it doesn't seem like he had a clear grasp on reality.

But even if this kid WAS affiliated with the Tea Party, would that mean that the Tea Party was to blame? I don't think so. Because, let's be honest, the Tea Party, for all it's rhetoric, hasn't produced any killers. (I know that's a little bit of a circular argument, but bare with me.)

The Tea Party is a broad movement with large pockets or radicalism and presumably other, quieter pockets of comparative moderation. They've been around for a couple of years and, despite some politics I disagree with and some occasionally troubling rhetoric, nobody's assassinated anyone. That means that, despite the anger, despite their frustration, despite a lot of people thinking or at least saying that they think that Obama is a Muslim or a Marxist or a Marxist Muslim, these people, deep down, know it's not OK to shoot someone.

To the extent that someone actually picks up a gun and kills someone and says it's because the Tea Party made them do it? Well, I'd submit that there has to be something more involved. Something that went wrong with that particular human being. And that, and not their political affiliations, is what's really to blame.

I guess the problem is that when what you're dealing with is one broken kid, you don't really have anyone to punish. And when people are dead, when a little girl is dead, you want someone to punish. So you pick something about the person who did it, and you make that "the reason" and you find other people with that thing in common and you make them "part of the problem" and then you punish them.

It's a small blessing, perhaps, that in this case, it's not so easy to find a scapegoat.

I think we're best off dealing with these shootings as the freak occurrences that they are. Horrible. Tragic. But not something that we can base our understanding of the world around. Not something that we can pivot our ideologies on. And certainly not something that we should shape whole blocks of public policy on.

But I suspect it's going to be unavoidable.