Whenever a deadly shooting rampage occurs, the experts are asked to explain the mental makeup of the perpetrator. Everybody struggles to understand what could drive an ordinary-seeming, though perhaps reserved, young man (it’s almost always a shy young man) to commit such a horrific act. But although the personality profiles of these mass-murderers share a few common features—paranoia and social isolation, most typically—we can’t really know what has driven a particular individual to violence.

A few hours after the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, I received a call from a local TV news station where I’d made regular appearances. They wanted to interview me about the tragedy. What could have motivated the twenty-three-year-old student, Seung Hui Cho, to kill two students in a dorm, then barricade a building and kill 30 more people before turning a gun on himself?

I declined to appear on-air because I couldn’t, in good conscience, render my professional opinion. I’m not an expert on violence. And even if I were, speculating about the psyche of a person I hadn’t met and knew nothing about would be unethical.

However, other professionals—including some forensic specialists—don’t seem to share my reservations. They freely offer up theories, often presenting their viewpoints as fact.

In a Washington Post article about the Colorado shootings, one forensic psychiatrist said, “Mass-shooting cases have the common motive of an attacker seeking immortality. Each of the attackers have [sic] different degrees of paranoia and resentment of the broader community. Some are so paranoid that they’re psychotic. Others are paranoid in a generally resentful way but have no significant psychiatric illness.” That makes sense (though I’d suggest that being a mass shooter is, ipso facto, indicative of significant psychiatric illness).

He goes on to add, “They’re people who are unfailingly unable to form satisfying sexual attachments.” Maybe that’s true. Still, I’d like to see more evidence.

But then he elaborates. “ . . . and their masculinity essentially gets replaced with their fascination for destruction. The overwhelming majority of folks who do this are male because of how, in our culture, masculine identity is so closely tied to the capacity to destroy.”

Really? Do most men derive their sense of identity from violence and destruction?

Fortunately, the Post article counters this histrionic gobbledygook with the more measured viewpoint of a psychiatric expert from Duke, who says, “They [mass killers] tend to be young and male and  . . . sort of isolated. The problem with that is that there are tens of thousands of people who meet the same description and never do anything like this.”

In the wake of this latest Colorado tragedy, we’re sure to see many more speculative statements about the mind of James Holmes. And they will be beside the point. Because no matter how much we’d like to comprehend the inner workings of a madman, we’ll never be able to make sense of a senseless act.