On Thursday, The Times featured on the front page a comment by Rep. Doug Collins. In response to the shooting of his colleague Steve Scalise, he said, “I don’t know any specifics on what drove this person to do this ... All I do know is that it’s not normal; it’s not rational. It’s just pure evil.”

Rep. Collins, I share your shock and repugnance at this awful act, but with due respect, I take issue with your conclusion that it’s “pure evil.”

Approaching the shooting from this perspective is one reason why we can’t seem to stop it. The shooter committed an evil act, but he was not, in himself, evil. What he did was, to a certain extent, both normal and rational. The man was sick. He acted out of warped sense of justice and duty to “kill the enemy.”

The shooter believed the Republican Party was evil and that this gave him license to attack and it actually try to kill one of its members. If one accepts the premise that killing an evil enemy is the right thing to do, the shooter is rational. If you believe the philosophical animosity that exists in our country today is natural, the act was natural.

If we want to stop these shootings, this is where we have to start. Violence never does anything but breed more violence. People do evil, but they are not themselves evil. We do not drive evil out of people, a culture or nation by attacking it. We disarm it though love and understanding.

This is a hard job. If you don’t think you can do it all at once, start by simply being civil.

Joan King
Sautee