And it continues.

In the wake of last Wednesday's tragic shooting at SuccessTech Academy, an alternative inner-city high school in Cleveland, Ohio, students and teachers were left asking, "Why?"

A suspended student with a troubled history entered the school Wednesday morning and opened fire on classmates on teachers, wounding two of each before fatally shooting himself.

As should be painfully clear by now, there are no easy answers or solutions and certainly no easy way to find closure when violent crimes take place in our public schools.

That doesn't seem to keep those of us on the outside from passing quick judgments.

The national media — especially the major news networks — like to find someone to blame. If Marilyn Manson didn't get enough press from the Columbine shooting, he's getting another chance now.

As the AP reports, the shooter wore black clothing, a Manson T-shirt and black nail polish. Only a week earlier he had told his classmates that he did not believe in God but did worship Manson.

Many people have long dismissed Manson or any of his black metal cohorts as culpable for increased school violence.

I have too, T-shirt on the shooter notwithstanding.

Blaming pop stars for violence — even cult pop stars — is akin to blaming video games, Hollywood or Halloween (some would blame all four).

How about somebody more directly involved with the incident, then?

There was a security guard on duty at the school, and some have argued there should have been two. Confronted with a lack of funding, school officials in Cleveland had previously eliminated the position of the second security guard.

Could the presence of a second security guard prevented the shooter from opening fire?

It's possible.

It's probably even more possible that the school's metal detectors would have stopped the student from bringing guns into the school in the first place, had they been in use Wednesday. They were used only intermittently.

But even with functioning metal detectors and two attentive security guards, there is no guarantee that the student would not have caused harm to others and himself that day. His recent suspension was for a fight outside the school.

Many parents might look to the shooter's troubled home life for an underlying explanation — a social worker described the shooter's relationship with his mother as poor, and the shooter's brother was detained by police only a day after the shooting for an unrelated incident.

If the shooter had been brought up in a less tumultuous environment, he probably would have had less violent leanings.

However, what any explanation or finger pointing for this shooting — or any other school shooting — seems to lack is the ability to predict or prevent future school shootings.

It's not that we shouldn't take note of possible causes and understand how situations might have been handled more appropriately. It's that we, and especially members of the media, should not presume to know the situation better than those who were there, as if we ourselves would have been able to prevent the violence.

It's terrible to awaken to the fact that the discussion on school shootings today has become less "When will they end?" and more "Where will the next one be?"

But in a free nation in an increasingly violent world, there will always be some who make violent choices. Rather than drive blame and bitterness into the ground, we would do better to mourn the loss, move on and continue to improve school safety as much as we can.

[Reach columnist Andrew Brown at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]