When confronted with terrifying and inexplicable events we experience extremely uncomfortable and seemingly unbearable individual and collective chaos. We are thrown into crisis. Nothing makes sense. Everything seems out of control. Life becomes terrifying. Our very survival appears to demand an immediate return to the perceived safety and certainty of life before the chaos of crisis.

Surviving a crisis can sometimes be as clear as finding the most direct path to safety: Leave a burning building through the closest exit. Seek a storm cellar before the tornado arrives. Go to high ground during a flood. These safety strategies are historically effective and may help us survive such moments of danger. We further understand that fires are extinguished, winds end, and waters recede. Most of us don't live in constant fear of these dangers and those who do seldom thrive. We also generally understand the root causes of these dangers. When these understandable crises end, their dangers for the most part also end. We clean up the debris, we bandage the wounded, we bury the dead and then we turn once again toward balance and life.

Common wisdom indicates that the mass shootings of the past decade have devastated our necessary sense of equilibrium and left us in a different type of crisis state. As we reel from the violence we demand explanation. As life becomes increasingly scary we seek accountability. Unfortunately, this is no simple crisis and, despite our yearnings for one, there is no clear, direct path to safety. There is no single source of our current danger. Nevertheless, flailing, we grasp at anything that might steady us. We cling to the simple solution and the named culprit. With a culprit and a solution we feel safer and more in control.

This human need to quickly resolve a crisis and regain safety and control is innate and understandable. As a strategy for resolving our current crisis of mass shootings this 'quick-find- the-culprit-and-implement-the-solution' approach holds the potential for doing more harm than good. All too quickly and all too frequently we point our fingers at already disenfranchised minorities and proudly proclaim that we've found the bad guys. We then feel compelled to 'do something about' those to whom our fingers point.

Read more in Huffington Post.