Thanks, you’re making my point…

This April will be Columbine’s 19th anniversary, almost two decades since the first unfocused mass killing by individuals who spent most of their spare time playing first person shooter video games, and whose stated goal was to emulate their video game experience — to kill as many randomly selected people as possible.

And the Bevers make a fine opposite bookend — two brothers whose stated goal was to beat Columbine.

Young people pick schools because they are familiar with them and schools present rich targets of opportunity. In almost all cases they kill strangers, or people who barely know them. Very few of them focus on one or more known victims. It’s not revenge against a person, it’s not that finely tuned.

That’s why they frighten us so much; there appears no way to avoid them because they are unfocused. We can’t improve our odds by altering our behavior because the game is random and our only role is victim.

And the difficulty you point out is the very beauty of the idea; numbers are the computer’s forte. It doesn’t care whether it’s monitoring ten people or ten-thousand people. All it cares about is whether the conditions it’s programmed to monitor appear, or don’t.

If it helps us predict the perpetrators of the small handful of unfocused mass killings that happen each year, and send them help before they go over the edge, it will be worth it.