The search is on for the reasons that James Cassidy shot 8 of his colleagues at the San Diego VTA Rail Yard.

It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter.

We keep asking these questions as if the answers would mean something. They don’t mean something. Some shootings occur because the shooter is a hate-filled racist. Some occur as the consequence of a domestic situation. Some, like this one, are the outgrowth of Some occur for no reason that is ever discovered, such as the Las Vegas shooting in 2017 where James Paddock shot and killed 58 people and injured another 411.

Why did he do it?

Nobody fucking knows.

To this day. Four years later and still nobody fucking knows.

In this case here, two things have already made the news:

1. Cassidy was retained in 2016 when he returned from the Philippines, and showed an unhealthy interest in terrorism and hatred of his coworkers (even though he was making about $114,000 at the VTA).
2. Cassidy had in his possession 32 illegal high-capacity cartridges, even though his weapons were purchased legally.

But again, none of this matters.

What matters is that this country is just flooded with guns, and nobody is going to be “taking these guns away.”

At the same time,Texas is proposing to allow people to carry guns without a license.

Because, they don’t have stupid enough gun laws in Texas.

Some of you may wonder why we can’t predict who’s going to go nuts and who isn’t?

Because we can’t.

There simply is no clear dividing line between those who think about doing crazy things (which includes many of us) and those who actually do them (which is still very rare).

Here people will be making a big deal of the fact that this particular asshole filled a notebook with rants about how much he hated his coworkers, and that federal investigators asked him about that in 2016.

But that was in 2016. It took five years for him to do something about it, and the chances are good that he never would have, but for some trigger that we don’t know about.

And if they had warned the VTA, what would the VTA have done about it. You can’t fire someone for hating their co-workers, if they’re not harassing them.

No, the problem my friends is well known and has been for decades: we simply have far too many military-style assault weapons out there.