It's Thursday, February 12, 2006.

I'm Albert Moller, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

We need to start with tragedy. This tragedy happened in British Columbia, one of the worst mass shootings in all of Canadian history. And the tragedy

just builds upon tragedy when you understand that the primary victims in this case were school

children. And it is one of the bloodiest school killings in all of Canadian history. And we're

also talking about a mass shooter here who shot his own mother and stepbrother

before going to the school and shooting others. And some of these children were just very young.

They were basically middle school, older elementary school students. And the death toll as of today

is at least nine. And there are others who are seriously wounded.

Now, one of the things that, of course, comes to the fore here is how any human being could carry out any such act.

It's one of the dark acts, evil acts, that just raises the question who could possibly do this.

And yet it happens. And tragically, it happens repeatedly.

And it's happened over history. And of course, it can happen in a different way with the development

of new technologies. And honestly, we can know about the happenings. This is also a part of the

context of mass shootings. It's a news spectacle. And that's a part of why it is believed some people do

them. And so you have to have the modern news context. You have to have, in some ways,

digital coverage and mass media coverage, and you also have to have the technology of violence

as well. But we're living in a world in which these things happen, and we should still be shocked.

As Christians, we need to understand we're the people who know the moral stakes here. We know

the moral evil here. And so our first response has to be a moral indictment of evil and the

human experience of tragedy and then compassion. When we think about the families involved,

when we think about the communities involved,

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