I wasn’t able go to the funeral Monday. Perhaps it’s just as well. So many people were there in body and spirit that one more mourner wouldn’t have made much difference. 
  I’ll visit my cousins later, after national interested has faded, crowds have dwindled, and the permanence of the empty place in their lives becomes too heavy a burden to bear alone. 
  I heard of the shooting in the church in Ft. Worth on the radio that evening while driving home from a hunting trip. 
My tired mind mused first on the irony of the location, of random murder in what traditionally is respected as sanctuary. 
  We’re not surprised when people are shot in bars and alleys, on dark streets and in bedrooms, but muggings of nuns and even thefts from church poor boxes cause deep revulsion in most of us. Mass murder in a church is unthinkable. 
  I wondered how long it would take the gun control ghouls to add the new tragedy to their bag of promotional tricks. 
  Then I thought no more of it and concentrated on driving home. 
  I had a lot of email when I got around to checking it on Thursday. After the usual notes from friends and ads for get-rich-quick schemes came a terse note from a relative in Dallas dated the evening before. Our cousin’s granddaughter had been shot in the church. She was in critical condition. 
  I scanned the list of email and punched up the next from the same relative. Reports that the young girl was in the hospital were incorrect. Cassie Griffin, 14, had been killed outright. Her mother, sitting not far behind her and diving to the floor with everyone else, had not been aware her daughter was hit. It was not until she and her husband had frantically checked hospitals and returned to the church that they learned their daughter was dead. 
  As I learned more about the killer, I wasn’t surprised that he seems typical of the breed. Larry Ashbrook wasn’t much different from the others who shoot school children or kill anyone whose color or culture differs from the twisted ideal in the killer’s mind. He was just another misfit with a hopeless, useless life, desperate to do something big. 
  The usual crowd of handwringers will renew its cry for more gun control, forgetting that this killer also used a bomb, not thinking that, had he not had guns, he might have spent more time perfecting his explosives and killed hundreds. 
  Forgetting, too, that, until the Oklahoma City bombing, in the largest mass murder in American history, nearly 100 people were killed, not with guns, but with a gallon of gas and a match. 
  Had one of the victims in Ft. Worth not been family, I would be less affected by the tragedy than most Americans are. I don’t watch TV, so I haven’t been assailed by five days of invasive news coverage, images of anguished faces and private sorrow made public. 
  I think of the millions of us who have wallowed in this “news,” if that’s what it is, on TV. I wonder about the very few among us who are more like Larry Ashbrook than like you and I. 
  While most who share the suffering vicariously through TV are sympathetic and touched in their hearts, there are a few who are not. 
  I wonder how many times Larry Ashbrook sat in front of his TV and absorbed the huge impact other mass murderers have had on victims, their families, and the nation. 
  I wonder if, after watching saturation coverage of one too many such shootings, after seeing one too many times the name of the killer become instantly known to the entire country, I wonder if Larry Ashbrook, in a dull flash of insight said to himself, “Hey! I can do that!” 
  And I wonder how many more such pathetic losers watched coverage this past week of the insurmountable grief of my cousin and his family and the other families of victims and are saying to themselves, “Hey! I can do that, too!”