It’s been nearly a month since the Wilkinsburg shooting and police have just started questioning a person of interest, also on Allegheny County’s Most Wanted list.

You may remember how the big fallout from this shooting was the same as every shooting. As a means of holding off some more cynical thoughts on Wilkinsburg as it relates to the police climate, here is something to watch for. This is the cycle Americans go through like clockwork in the event of a school shooting. Here is American shooting cycle:

Step 1: The initial shooting, the catalyst. Nothing much to add here.

Step 2: Initial media reports. This is where the media interviews people who just escaped the site. This is the start of the emotional appeal that is to come.

Step 3: The call for tighter gun laws. This is where the emotional appeal is put to use; so that reason and logic no longer play a part in the public discussion. Most shootings take place in gun-free zones, where guns are not allowed. These generally include malls, schools, colleges, post offices, and theaters. Some even take place in states with some of the most stringent gun laws in the country, namely California, New York, or Illinois. Despite this, there is often a call for tighter gun laws, under the guise of them being “commonsense” gun laws.

Quick sidebar- these laws are cosmetic, but that’s a discussion for next week.

Step 4: the victims are laid to rest. By now the story has faded from the country’s mental radar and the emotion that drove Step 3 has gone out.

Step 5: A return to normal life.

Nothing changes, nothing is done. Why is this? Because with each successive shooting in a gun free zone, people ask what practical good the laws will do. These laws have included bans of so-called “assault weapons” (those scary looking AR-15s and AK-47s) even if they weren’t used in the shooting, magazine capacity limits, and mental health checks.

We'll cover one, but again the discussion of the laws deserves to be separate. The mental health checks sound like a good idea, but there are two caveats. The first of which is that if one is already committed to a mental hospital, they are legally forbidden from purchasing or owning a firearm. The system at most needs refinement, but this leads to the possibility of some Gattaca-esque world where a slight case of autism makes you an "invalid" and a second-class citizen, denied a Constitutional right because you're not "normal" like the rest of us.

Secondly, they miss the point. When people think of a killer, they think that something must be medically wrong with him. He’s paranoid, schizophrenic or something like that. People tried to tie the Sandy Hook shooter's actions to autism. Eventually, it is discovered that the shooter had some rambling umpteen page manifesto or left behind some video rant, in a few cases we see that he had been planning the attack for months. These are not the works of men who are crazy. They are works of men who are evil. They are calloused, brutal, violent and angry, but perfectly sane medically speaking.

Next week, we’ll look at the concept of evil and the role it plays in shootings that make every law you can name meaningless.