This is quoted from a email I received from a website I really like, The Asperger Experts:

We need to talk.

It was recently revealed that the Christopher Harper-Mercer, the suspect in last week's school shooting in Oregon, had Asperger's Syndrome.

Why is this relevant? It's not, but people seem to want to believe it is.

So, let me clear up a few things. Just so we can't possibly be clearer.

A person, a troubled, tormented person, stormed into a school and killed almost a dozen people because he chose to do so. It was a choice that he made in that moment. It wasn't Asperger's that killed those people. It was a man who saw no way out and chose to take as many people with him as he could.

It's heartbreaking.

It's terrifying.

It's absolutely awful in every conceivable way.

My heart bleeds for the people who bled that day.

But you know what?

That's not the real issue.

An epidemic grips our nation, wringing it free of the dignity and integrity on which it once prided itself.

It's not the flu.

It's not smallpox.

It's ignorance.

We assign blame so prematurely, so readily it's absolutely terrifying.

Tragedy does this. It plants seeds of anger that immediately erupt into big, terrible thoughts, actions, and feelings that point fingers at the innocent and ingore the true culprit. It informs, feeds, and fuels ignorance in the most terrible, subversive way it can.

We react rather than respond.

We blame rather than bleed.

We are so focused on hating whoever committed such a heinous crime that we forget to love and bleed for those who lost someone or something that day.

Blaming Asperger's (or mental illness) won't bring those students back. In fact, it will take even more of them from us. Hate breeds more hate. That's the simple truth of it.

Our attempts to make sense of such a troubling turn of events are actually pushing us farther away from a solution.

Harper-Mercer took those lives because he felt alienated, misunderstood. How do you think this newest misunderstanding will go over?

I say this not to be cruel, punitive, or judgemental. I say this because I want us to focus on what's important, on what we're really here for.

And that's love.

Love for the sake of loving. Give for the sake of giving. Be for the sake of being. Chaos only wins if we lose sight of what's important.

Love is, has been, and always will be the bottom line.