We need to talk about Salvador Ramos

It’s been over a week now since Salvador Ramos burst in to an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas and fatally shot 19 children and two teachers. Still a question remains: why did he do it?

One answer is that he was evil: evil people do evil things. Another is that he was crazy: crazy people do crazy things. And yet another is that he was made to do bad things because of all the bad things that had happened to him: Ramos reportedly had a childhood speech impediment and was subjected to bullying because of this.

These explanations all share one thing: the conviction that human behaviour is broadly explicable. But some acts are so phenomenally wicked they test the limits of our capacity to understand them. They are just too morally grotesque, making it almost impossible to transport ourselves into the shoes – or blood-soaked trainers – of the perpetrator in question.