Why do they do it? Why do young, crazy men choose the weeks before Christmas to terrorize and murder innocent victims? There are so many theories – but no real answers. Why not?

Now don’t get me wrong, early spring is another popular time for those post-pubescent shooting sprees as we vividly recall in our memories of Columbine and Virginia Tech.

In fact, I am saddened to think that I am able to mark some of my recent, significant life events with the infamous shooting sprees that have occurred. I shudder to think how personal this is becoming and I would guess I am not alone in this macabre phenomenon.

In early April, 1999 I moved from Connecticut to Nebraska for a job opportunity. On April 20 I watched the footage of the Columbine shooting from the apartment my employer rented for my relocation. The tragedy enables me to remember that particular time in my life with vivid clarity – and deep sadness.

On December 5, 2007 it became that much more personal as I sat at my desk and answered a phone call from my frantic mother, in Connecticut. She wanted to know if I knew where my husband was at that moment because news of a fatal department store shooting in Omaha – a store that was located a mere 4.3 miles from where I was sitting at that moment and a place where nine lives had minutes before been claimed – was all over the news in Connecticut. Mom was frantically trying to ensure that her family remained unscathed. We did – at least physically. The psychological toll from the trauma, the tentacles of which reached out to connect people and places we would never have imagined, was overwhelming.

It left a marked pall on Christmas that year. To this day I am never able to enter that wonderful department store without completing a mental checklist of exits and hiding places.

On April 16, 2007 I was sitting in the hospital waiting to be prepped for my thyroidectomy as I watched the footage of the carnage in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shooting. The surreal experience of surgical anesthesia combined with the even more surreal TV coverage of the unimaginable will forever be burned in my brain as one unworldly event.

This holiday, as I await Mom’s arrival from my former home state of Connecticut, I contemplate an act of senseless and brutal violence that occurred on December 14th. This particularly heinous event completes a bizarre and macabre circle of tragedy with connections to key events and places in my life. I fear that my level of separation from these tragedies is far less than the six degrees of removal from Kevin Bacon. That thought is sobering.

I also find that two of these horrific occurrences give me cause for personal shame. The Omaha shooting has made me feel the need to be embarrassed to live in a place where such a travesty could occur. What kind of people must live here in order for something like this to happen? Why would I want to live here? For a long time I wanted to shout out “I live in Omaha and there are wonderful and brave people who would give their lives to save others – and have – right here!”

I now find my humiliation reversed. How embarrassing to hail from Connecticut where unspeakable things can happen to precious and innocent children. I feel the need to explain to everyone that Newtown is really a wonderful and quaint, but upscale little town. There are really some wonderful people who live there – it’s a place you would want to go! But my protestations only seem to provide a more up-close look at a place that now qualifies as hell on earth – at least for a time.

For events that have never really touched my life – these events have all touched my soul in a way that is unrecoverable. I am affected by them. I am altered by them. They are personal to me.

Bad things happen in life: hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, asteroids landing on houses (I don’t have personal knowledge of this); but there’s another kind of tragic event – a kind that is man-made, a kind that could be stopped. But isn’t. I shudder to think of the future when these senseless and tragic shootings are occurring closer and closer together, more and more often.