THE SEARCH FOR AN EXPLANATION IS ALWAYS TOUCHING, and painful in a sort of secondary, aftermath way--morally and intellectually heartbreaking. There must be a reason. Find the reason, and the thing becomes easier to bear.
So, after the man slaughtered the children in Dunblane, Scotland, and used his last shot to obliterate Exhibit A, which was his own brain, people ransacked whatever evidence remained. They looked in the man's past for telltale shreds, for that tracery of cause and effect that lets the mind begin to make peace with such events. The horror needs to be processed in words, to be...