News is hard sometimes.

On Wednesday, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau shot Cpl. Nathan Cirillo dead in Ottawa before Sergeant-At-Arms Kevin Vickers shot the terrorist dead in turn.

We were in class learning how to make a rudimentary webpage playfully titled “(insert name here) likes beer”. We were stressing over the machinations of code and joking about how bad the title of the site would look if it were drop-shadowed or over-bolded.

At the same time, Winnipeg police announced the number of dead infants found in a storage container the day before by U-Haul staff was six instead of the presupposed “three or four”. Initially I was disgusted that people were unable to tell if there were three or if there were four. My imagination ran wild. The reality was even worse.

At the same time, Winnipeggers took to the polls to vote in an election rife with racial conflict and accusations of scandal.

Earlier in the semester, a man approached me on a bike as I was arriving at school around 7:45 a.m. I was unloading a camera, a tripod, a sound kit.

“Hey,” he said. “Did you know Canada was stolen from the natives?”

It was an odd question (an odder circumstance, really,) but I did know that. I had learned it in… Grade 10? Grade 11? It had become intrinsic knowledge to me throughout the rest of my high school career and, later, throughout my history degree. Intrinsic guilt.

“Yeah,” I said. His face was blank and he biked away. I heard the woman he was with scolding him. I walked into school.

Later in the week, another shooting. This time in the states. High school student Jaylen Fryburg opened fire at his school, killing one other person before killing himself.

It just seems like too much to handle, sometimes. Horrific story after horrific story.

Patrice Vincent, James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Faron Hall, Tina Fontaine, Michael Brown, Ferguson, New Hampshire.

It never seems to end. I pore over these things, trying to understand what could motivate someone or some group of people. I try to empathize with a lifetime of cultural and societal oppression, a war-forged upbringing, a mental illness.

The rage someone must feel to self-righteously load a weapon and unload it on a stranger. The unholy fervor someone must feel, the brutal and fiery metamorphosis someone must go through to think it’s OK to sever someone’s head with a knife. the horror and fury a group of people must feel to take it upon themselves to drag the bottom of a river for bodies.

I just can’t understand. I’ve tried to understand. There’s so much anger. Everywhere you turn, anger. Boiling tensions all across the globe, horror worldwide. The past few months have hit me hard in this respect. This week especially. Sometimes it’s better to turn off the news.

I wish I had more time and energy to flesh this post out a little more. I can do better, I just don’t have the time because of school. If you take anything away from reading this, make it this other, better article from Esquire about the mentality of mass shootings and the people who work to prevent them.

It’s an important story.

Here’s an excerpt:

IT WASN’T JUST THE GUNS. It was how the guns shaped his thinking—how they fedhis thinking. They were always there. There were fourteen of them in a locked closet. They were military-grade weapons. There was an M1 rifle. There was a Swedish Mauser. There were Russian SKS’s. And there was ammunition, loads of it. It was all just right there, a few feet away, and not just physically. Spiritually. In his memories. One of his earliest memories was of his father sitting on the couch cleaning his guns. He always knew they were readily accessible. But in his mind, they were more than that. His father was a member of the NRA. He believed in the God-given right to bear arms. But what did that mean, God-given, to a boy like him? It meant that God wanted him to have a gun. It meant that deep down he was a warrior. It meant that he was born to be something other than what he was. “You take someone with very low self-esteem and put a gun in his hands, he feels like a movie hero…”