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The basic facts were still being sorted out on the afternoon of the Virginia Tech shootings when we received the first press release from a Christian organization with an agenda to promote.

The deaths, we were informed, were "the result of gun control." This despite the fact that Virginia is among the least restrictive states in which to acquire firearms.

The agendas and self-promoting commentaries continued to pour in. The massacre was the fault of violent video games, several activists claimed—though there was no evidence that Seung-Hui Cho had ever played Halo 2 or any of its many cousins.

Others blamed the massacre on demon possession. That's not unthinkable, but it's also completely unfalsifiable.

News organizations were also eager to assign a cause for the tragedy. Stories and op-eds multiplied, calling for greater government expenditures in mental health, tighter government restrictions on guns, and increasingly elaborate security plans for public institutions.

But pronouncements like these fall short of answering the real question and invite us to look further. If it was mental illness that caused Cho's violent episode, was it because of some childhood trauma? Or a random twist in his dna? And if the episode was due to either cause, was it predictable or preventable?

Professionals had recognized Cho's mental illness, labeled it, and referred him for treatment. A judge had made it all official. Did that do any good?

The head of Virginia Tech's campus counseling center reportedly blamed the lack of a government social safety net for the apparent inability of campus officials to stop a disturbed person from acting on his violent fantasies. The propensity of some to locate responsibility for an individual's irrational acts on a government failure is appalling.

Indeed, the thought of implementing broad programs to prevent someone with a severe mental disorder from ever turning violent is both impracticable and prohibitively expensive. Solving yesterday's problem with tomorrow's social engineering is tempting. But focusing on yesterday and tomorrow keeps us from thinking about today.

We believe that CT readers—at least a significant portion of them—are focused on the present and on people's needs.

While the mainstream media were asking why and how questions, CT's online poll showed that relatively few of our readers (less than 10 percent) were interested in why Cho did it. Fewer still wanted to know how he could have been stopped, and only a handful were interested in political solutions that might prevent similar attacks in the future. Overwhelmingly, our readers wanted to know: How are Christians ministering in the aftermath?

What does this tell us? It suggests, first of all, that Christians are realistic about human nature and the presence of evil in society. We tend not to invest ourselves in utopian dreams of eliminating evil. Tragedies are going to happen. The human heart is profoundly wicked.

"There is no one righteous, not even one," Paul wrote in Romans 3. And then he linked up a concatenation of clauses from the Hebrew Bible to make his point: "All have turned away; … their throats are open graves; … the poison of vipers is on their lips; … their feet are swift to shed blood."

The Bible teaches us that the evil we see in others exists (with terrifying potential) in our hearts as well. This insight is fundamental to understanding Jesus, Paul, and Luther—not to mention ourselves.

Second, the overwhelming interest in ministry suggests that we refuse to be paralyzed by questions about free will and determinism. Those questions are worth exploring—both in their classic theological form and in the modern equivalents handed us by behavioral science. But the conundrum won't be easily resolved. The realities of human misbehavior cannot be reduced to a handy, either-or proposition.

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June 2007, Vol. 51, No. 6