This video of a three-year-old telling the story of Star Wars super-adorable. Watch it.

I pulled up Google News a few minutes ago and, at the top of the page, saw items relating to two events I had heard about on NPR throughout the day. Now I have time to read about them.

A man in Missouri, fed up with local officials who, in his opinion, treated him unfairly, showed up at a City Council meeting and killed five people before police shot and killed him.

A student in Louisiana took a gun into a university classroom and killed two other students before killing herself.

I suppose there are psychologists somewhere who can explain these things. There are probably plenty of other people with easy conclusions waiting in the wings, too. But I am less worried about why it happens than I am about how to prevent it. The psychologists are probably right about why it happens. The rest of us, though—citizens, neighbors, politicians—could do a better job of preventing it.

Unfortunately, most of the ideas for preventing gun violence seem to do nothing so much as assiduously avoid the real problem. From the Right, the typical suggestion is simply harsher penalties after the fact; from the Left, it’s gun control. Harsher penalties clearly would not have prevented the events noted above, because those people were prepared to die when they acted. Gun control might have kept the violence from being lethal, or from being carried out with guns, but it would not have addressed the real problem.

Both of the typical solutions leave a glaring hole in the process, from the time a person acquires a gun to the time a person enters the criminal justice system: in between, a person commits an act of violence that severely disrupts the social circumstances surrounding him or her. Something happens inside that person to make him or her likely to cause violence regardless of the availability of a weapon—the violence may not even be physical—and the failure of consequential deterrents ought to tell us that there is something unique about these individuals’ mental state so that consequences, no matter harsh, cannot deter them.

This is perhaps indicative of my frustration with politics in this country. We have the party of gun control (Democrats), the party of harsher criminal penalties (Republicans), and the party of leave-me-the-hell-alone (Libertarians), but there is no party of cultivating whole and healthy people.

Maybe there shouldn’t be such a party, or maybe there shouldn’t be any political parties at all. Parties seem to affect people in much the same way religion affects people: they cause people to be angry at each other, for no reason other than the fact that they disagree on theoretical points; they cause people to segregate themselves; they cause people to take up irrationally extreme positions; they cause people to donate large sums of money; sometimes they inspire people. Most of all, though, they seem to distract people from reality.

As I noted in my last post here, the fundamental, inescapable fact at the root of all politics is that people must live together. Stories about people showing up in public, civic, and educational venues and murdering others are perfect examples of a failure to live together. That failure belongs to all of us.

We might disagree on how to cultivate whole and healthy people, but none of us should disagree that a society filled with such people cannot be worse than a society filled with the fractured and ill. As our society becomes more complex, interdependent, and transparent, it is more important than ever that we ensure the health, safety, and well-being of every person, whether by collective efforts or by increasing our individual awareness to the proximity of our fellow citizens and the danger of setting them off.

Simple things can do it. Simple things can set people off and simple things can keep them happy.