Derrick Bird met up with his friend Peter Leder last night and told him, “You won’t see me again.” The next day, this popular, well liked, normal man armed himself with a gun and killed one of his friends. He then got in his car and drove across Cumbria shooting people out of the window. He killed 12 and injured another 25 before finally taking his own life.

I’ve been wondering what to write about this – if I should, in fact, write about it at all.

I suppose I do have something to say – something that politicians can’t say, even though they really, really should – and that’s this:

Disgusting travesties like this happen. They’re rare. Very, very rare, but when they happen they’re shocking, appalling and we naturally feel compassion and sympathy for those have have lost their lives and loved ones.

No doubt over the next few weeks people will search for answers: What ‘pushed him over the edge’? What can we do to make sure this never happens again? Perhaps gun laws will be tightened still further, or perhaps there’ll be another gun amnesty, or perhaps they’ll be a high profile campaign to get arms off the streets.

But this sort of thing will happen again, no matter what we do today or tomorrow.

Sometimes, and we don’t really know why, one person out of the 60 million of us, perhaps every 10 years or so, will simply do something beyond forgiveness, redemption or understanding. It’s the price, I suppose, of being the type of creatures that we are. The only sane response is to accept it, to understand that we can never be protected against some nutter deciding, out of the blue, to murder strangers for no other reason than the fact that he’d decided to do it.

We simply hope it won’t happen to us – and for most of us, as near as possible all of us, it won’t.

But these things will never make sense to the sane. We shouldn’t even try. We mourn, if we wish, and we move on.

These things, you see, just happen.