The Human Tragedy of Senseless Violence

I learned this week that my wife is related to one of the victims of the mass shooting in Las Vegas. The great-grandmother of the woman who was killed was the sister of my wife’s grandfather. It seems like a distant relation, but I have relatives who are similarly related, and they don’t seem distant when I’m with them.

My wife and I vacationed in Las Vegas early in our relationship. It was one of our first big trips together. We had a wonderful time exploring the sights and experiences of this amazing city. I can’t imagine if something had happened to her there, some senseless act of violence. I question whether I would have had the strength to go on. A tragic event like that would have haunted me forever.

Fifty-eight people where killed in Las Vegas that evening. Fifty-eight families are left to deal with the sudden, permanent loss of a loved one. How many husbands, wives, parents, children, brothers, sisters, and friends are left to deal with that grief, left to ask how something so pointless could have happened? Left to ask why? Five hundred more suffered significant injuries. None of those people will ever be the same.

The scope of this tragedy and the pain left in its wake is incomprehensible. How could one person inflict harm on so many, people that he didn’t even know, people with whom he had no apparent grievance? What drove him to plan a massacre of innocent people methodically for months in advance? How will the families and the surviving victims cope with what has happened to them? How will any of us ever look at life the same way again?

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