The day after the horrible shooting at Trolley Square, a co-worker of mine said something to the effect of: “You’re a liberal- are you going to use this incident to call for the ban of all guns like you guys always do?”

Without expressing my personal opinions of guns, I told him that unlike conservatives, liberals’ beliefs and values aren’t spoon-fed to them over the airwaves or other venues. The beliefs of liberals are about as diverse as liberals themselves.

Regardless, this really isn’t such a narrow political issue. This is only a political issue in that we need political leaders that realize we have to address the social and cultural root of this problem. We need to figure out how someone becomes so disenfranchised and socially dissociated that they would kill others. Why does our country have a preponderance for deadly violence as compared to other developed nations? Is it our winner-take-all culture? Is it the ever-increasing socio-economic divide? The experts probably already have pretty good clues.

Whatever it is, we need to start addressing these issues – level the playing field and ensure that everyone feels that they have the same chance as everyone else at life. We now know that the perpetrator of this shooting was a Bosnian refugee. The culture change itself is probably pretty difficult; going from your homeland where violence was common with people were being slaughtered every day and moving to a place where even non-Mormons feel out of place couldn’t be easy.

There should be no excuses for taking the life of another, but we need to figure what puts someone in a mental state close enough to hit that tipping point. Once we do that, I believe that the gun issue will become moot.