Shooting at a gay bar killed about 50 people.

First, NO ONE deserves to be killed for their beliefs or orientation, I don't care what your stance is.

Second, I want to be very careful to respect the dead, their families, and friends. So if I word this wrong, please read it to err towards respect to all the victims of the shooting.

But I'm sick of the cycle. This type of thing gets repeated over and over again. For what the shooters are trying to do, this type of attack has been shown to be very effective, and so it will continue.

Right now all kinds are people are hurt, angry, scared, and they are saying what we should do to stop this sort of thing from happening ever again.

The same people are making the same arguments.

"If only we had banned assault rifles."

"If only someone there has had a gun."

"If only we were more accepting of gays."

"If only we were harder on terrorism."

If only . . . If only . . . if only?

We're hardwired as a species to make order out of chaos. We're wired to find a pattern in a random pattern. It's how we survived predators. It's primal and intuitive.

The hunter-gatherer who saw the face of a predator in the shadows was more cautious -- even if it was a false alarm. The one who wasn't looking for patterns missed the predator in camouflage and got eaten.

But now in a situation like this we get scared, hurt, and angry, and our primitive brains seize onto a simple solution that helps us feel better and sleep at night in a big scary world.

None of the knee-jerk reactions we're about to see in the news, none of the 140 character pearls of wisdom that we'll be pelted with on Facebook, none on the tired old cliches that will be recycled as though they just needed to be repeated one more time will make a lick of difference.

The truth is - that we cannot predict and control every outcome. The world is too big and has too many evil people in it to do that.

Like a toddler, when something like this happens we grab our safety blanket that we've repeat to ourselves to shut out the evil world, so we can sleep at night.

There's no single, simple solution to this. Life is dangerous.

Grow up and stop arguing over which color of the baby blanket is going to keep us safer. 

Let's have more respect for the dead than that. Let's call our attention-getting news bit armchair philosophy for what it is: it's to make us feel better -- it's not about the victims.

Let's have a moment of silence for the dead, and take a moment to all agree together that for whatever reason, this act was wrong.