It was Oxford Township, Michigan’s turn to hold a candlelight vigil last night. You know, for the three kids who were murdered and the eight others who were wounded by a 15-year-old classmate. We’ve gotten really good at those candlelight vigils.

One speaker at the vigil said, “We’re all in this together.” But no, we’re not. Well, we’re all “in this” but we’re not in it together. Most of us are in the Jesus suffering fuck, pass some goddamn sensible gun safety laws already contingent, but the folks in power mostly belong to the God gave us the 2nd Amendment and if we have to routinely sacrifice random men, women, and children to it, then that’s just what we’ll have to do club. So no, we’re not in this together. Except, you know, when it comes to that whole candlelight vigil business. We’re totally in that together. Those things don’t just happen; they take work. Organization, cooperation, shit like that.

The headline in this morning’s Washington Post:

Oxford High School shooting suspect in custody, motive unknown after 3 killed, 8 injured in Michigan

Motive unknown. Motive. Like this is some television show where the crime can be solved. If only we understood why this kid decided to borrow the Sig Sauer 9mm pistol his daddy bought on Black Friday and used it to murder his classmates, we’d…what? Solve school shootings?

We can all hazard a half dozen guesses as to the kid’s motive. There’s no fucking mystery here. Every kid who has ever attended school in a modern industrial society has, at some point, felt miserable and hopeless and frustrated and unloved and resentful and alienated and lonely and angry. A very small minority of those kids have focused all those awful emotions on their classmates.

The problem isn’t the kid’s motive. The problem is the capacity to act on the motive. Some of those kids have access to firearms. How did this kid get access to his daddy’s new pistol?

That’s not a mystery either. Michigan doesn’t require firearm owners to lock up their weapons. That’s right. If you live in Michigan, you can just leave guns lying around the house–like throw pillows or coasters for your drinks. Maybe this kid’s daddy kept his guns (yes, guns, plural, the police seized a bunch of them from the house) locked up–I don’t know. But in Michigan, he had a legal right to leave them scattered around the house like Hummel figurines.

This is America. We don’t do common sense gun law. We do candlelight vigils. We hold a vigil, then we ask why this happened, after which we vow to make sure nothing like this will ever happen again, and then we lament that there’s absolutely nothing we can possibly do to prevent it from happening again. That’s what we do. Because we’re all in this.

But not together. We’re a long way from together.