I tried to field their questions with a bit of humor and some questions of my own to get them thinking. I stressed the fact that many people are playing "armchair quarterback" as a way to place blame and make sense out of this destructive act. After any tragedy, people piece together what had happened as a way to figure out how to avoid such events in the future. With hindsight, it is easy to look at the event and criticize the actions of the people who had pieces of a puzzle that we only now see clearly.
I also said that people will use this event as an opportunity to promote a political agenda, claiming that having done so earlier would have avoided it. There will be some truth to the various sides of the argument. However, they avoid talking about the one truth behind all violent acts: we are all capable of them, and our society is still working on ways to better channel the violent tendencies that all of us have.
This is not new to history. In fact, despite all of the press and commentary on social media, the past two decades have been the most peaceful (by nearly any measure of violence) in the history of the United States and even the world. Acts such as this one stand out so much more partially due to advances in communication, but also because they stand in such a sharp contrast to the norm we have come to expect.
This event was a tragedy, and we will hopefully learn from it as we have learned from the events that preceded it. In doing so, I hope that we will continue to make our nation and our world a better place.