Our village failed this young man, including the role models (teachers, professors, Scout leaders, fellow classmates, etc.), authority figures (campus leaders, campus police, local police), neighbors, family, friends, co-workers, mental health professionals, community leaders, and a host of others who move in and out of the boundaries of peoples’ lives from time to time, including our own.

Our culture and our society failed this young man. The sign posts were all there and more obvious over time, i.e., a lonely young man with a troubled home life who could not get those around him to listen and hear, however plaintive his disordered thoughts and cries were. So, he turned to social media to express himself and his alarming messages, and also to warn us. Yet, incredibly, we still overlooked and ignored him. If anything is clear in this case about Loughner, it is that the village failed him, and failed him miserably. There is nothing new here – we did the same thing with the VA Tech student shooter. We’ve seen this over and over again in our gun crazed society, our society that is so techno-device-centric driven that we insulate ourselves from one another in one way or another every day. Or, we simply turn a blind eye. The real underlying tragedy of this horrific crime is that the entire village ignored this young man.