Ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

There are several confirmed and unsubstantiated details about Thomas Jacob Sanford, the man who assaulted an LDS church in Michigan this last weekend. We know he was a Marine and a decorated Iraq War veteran and that he had a child with significant health issues; we have evidence that he supported the current presidency and right-wing positions such as abortion restrictions; we are told he hated Mormons and parroted much of the online rhetoric that considered the religion to be evil; we have speculation that one motive for his attack was that he had been in a relationship with a woman from a Mormon background and that this relationship had ultimately ended.

If all of the above turns out to be true, there are important lessons that we as Americans should learn from this monstrous event, although I’m not confident we actually will.

We could consider the consequences of programming people for war, particularly for combat in a civilian population and infrastructure. We could ask ourselves if we invest well enough in care and oversight when soldiers return from war with their psyches altered and their skills enhanced.

We could continue asking ourselves what we should do about the unrelenting churn of radicalizing content on the world wide web and what it will take to stem the tide of extremism becoming mainstreamed.

We could confront our interpretations of masculine identity, not only in the way it discourages men from seeking proper mental healthcare but also in the way it nurtures a sense of entitlement that is unable to process rejection in a healthy manner.

We could do more to fix the broken social systems that lead people to their feelings of powerlessness and desperation while they are persistently sold solutions that claim to restore their potency, their agency, their sense of self-worth.

And we could reason that until we’ve made significant progress on the lessons I’ve outlined above, we are better off restricting access to firearms, which all too often become the tool by which all of our human failings are made into a rampaging, tangible force that rips apart the lives of others.