What's wrong with this world?

Here I sit in beautiful (sic) Mentor, OH on a Friday night away from home watching a CNN feed of coverage from Johnson Space Center in Houston. Today had the unfortunate luck of being the second in a week where a questionably sane person decided to take a gun and shoot innocent people. The Virginia Tech shootings happended just 3 days ago, and the wake of those events are still on the front page. I'm sure that I don't have to share my feelings about these dispicable acts, as they likely echo those of 99.999% of all Americans. However, there are a few things that I feel I must talk about here, since at the moment it's my only outlet...

What I wrestle with more than anything during weeks like these is the contradiction of how they happen in our society. We live in a society predicated on free will, giving our citizens the ultimate in personal freedoms. The duality comes in when you realize that ultimate freedom also breeds ultimate carelessness. Our society gives people every opportunity to hurt others; we just hope & pray that won't. Why would they? I'm generally in favor of protecting people's freedoms because I truly want to believe in the good of people. Furthermore, I'm not really sure how beneficial to society as a whole it would be to ban all handguns. Something just tells me that mentally unstable people like the freaks of this week would simply find another means of doing their bidding. Which brings me to my final thought...

I'll be the first to admit that I understand very little about mental illness. I can't even imagine myself in that situation, where I've lost all appreciation for the value of human life and am willing to kill others and myself. Perhaps these two individuals were so out of their minds that their thoughts of hate and murder appeared to them to be pefectly lucid and sane. All I have to reconcile the acts of the past few days is the hope that they weren't fully aware, because the contrary really scares the hell out of me.