Maybe the "really bad man" is actually crazy rather than bad? That will surely be the issue concerning Anders Breivik.

Demonstrating once again that law is not the force that holds society together.

Attempts to understand the really bad man's mental state are inevitably speculative, and any ex post facto analysis of such a person will always suffer from the adversarial, identity-based nature of our public discourse.

Really? It seems to me that the "really bad man," which means so far probably the insane man, has a mental state that is if anything easier to identify than that of the "bad man," whose unconscious may have developed in any one of a number of subtle directions.

What ends up being decided about the really bad man is that their actions often emerge from something like extreme desperation, even mental illness. But to say that only those with mental illnesses take such horrific action is a conclusory shortcut.

Not conclusory unless independent of the available evidence.

Behavior so far outside a universal human norm could plausibly be, by itself, mental illness, especially when the only evidence is the end result.

No, especially when accompanied by other behavior or ideation accompanying particular disorders in other patients.

Despite this difficulty, the aggregate societal response is an attempt to adequately reconcile the illusion of control with its apparent failure.

One prominent social response.

Probably not as simple as we will unconsciously need to believe, right?

The person responsible is the one who pulled the trigger.

Unless the person who pulled the trigger is not responsible because of some intervening condition, like severe mental illness or duress, that we consider defeats legal as well as moral responsibility for acts.

The vortex of authority and social forces swirling around them, while certainly contributory, ultimately fails against the deliberate acts of a really bad man.

Also fails against the not-deliberate acts of a really insane one.

So it was with the legal system, when precious outrage was directed at a judge who let someone slip through the cracks. So it was with the police, when they mistakenly assumed that the first shooting was an isolated incident. And so it was with the administration, when their apparent failure to communicate with students under existing policies preceded the second shooting. Never mind the benefit of hindsight; the altar of public opinion requires a lamb.

There are both rational and unconscious motives lying behind the behavior of investigating and criticizing the performance of social actors following catastrophic events. Describing the causes does not seem to me to result in an argument against holding such inquiries, anymore than understanding grief and mourning results in an argument against holdings funerals.

Of course there were crucial lapses and communication failures that contributed to the tragedy, and responsibility moving forward should rightly fall to those who will be in a position to fix those problems and prevent recurrences. But considering the presumption of personal liberty in our society, such efforts can hardly prevent the next determined really bad man.

Preventing insane people from doing insane things may be theoretically impossible, but this is not a rational, let alone resonant, argument against being more careful and effective in our care for the mentally ill, or in being more scrupulous in preventing mentally-ill people who are at risk for violence from acquiring sophisticated weapons.

You have not explained what this analysis contributes when the offender is insane, as Breivik surely is, and Cho Seung-hui also surely was.

Maybe. I think both the conscious and unconscious motives lie elsewhere. How did you establish that these are the only ones?

I don't understand what this means. We say people are mentally ill for the same reason we say people are physically ill: because we have examined them and arrived through the collection and analysis of evidence at diagnostic conclusions. We may misunderstand or misinterpret the evidence for any number of reasons, and it is appropriate to assume that some diagnoses will be faulty. Of course conclusions presented in the course of high-stakes litigation will be hotly controverted with apparent success on both sides, but that does not prevent facts from existing, or even consensus from developing outside the crucible of litigation.

Now that Anders Breivik has given days of public testimony, I do not think it will be difficult for people to reach the conclusion that he is insane. In Cho Seung-hui's case, the presence of past diagnostic recognition of his illness sufficiently probative of dangerousness to self and others to justify mandatory treatment is pretty conclusive.

I don't understand why you are at a loss for things to do. Cho should not have been able to acquire firearms. Obvious, reasonable national enforcement of existing national firearms regulations that prohibit people in his situation from gaining access to killing machines would have been sufficient to save all those lives.