With a total of 70 victims (12 dead, 58 wounded), ABC News reports the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater shooting is the worst mass shooting in American history. Still, its aftermath will follow a familiar pattern.

Politicians call for unity while the media focuses intensely, but briefly, on the victims, searches the shooter’s background for clues to his motivation, then turns its attention to the perennial debates about guns and partisan political associations. Lost will be any serious national debate about be the real causes of these crimes.

At first, as it should be, our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. Unless they include someone like a Gabrielle Giffords or other well-known figure, we won’t remember their names; but it’s their loss and the grief of their families and friends that touches us. Men and women in the armed services volunteer to go in harm’s way. These men, women, and children simply wanted to enjoy a movie. Their loss and suffering serves no larger purpose, and it leaves indelible scars.

As for the shooter, James Holmes, his actions are prima facie evidence of a deranged mind. Society will lock him up and determine if he is insane or able to stand trial for his crime. If he stands trial, a jury of his peers will convict him, sentence him to death, or put him in prison for life.

That leaves the rest of us to ask why these events happen and how we can prevent them.

One mindset is that if we just make certain semi-automatic guns less available we can reduce the incidents in which they are used for such evil purpose. People who advocate this remedy cite statistics from countries with stricter gun laws and lower gun-homicide rates.

Recall, however, that it was only last July that a deranged gunman killed 70 people on Norway’s Utøya Island. Norway’s gun laws are much stricter than those in the U.S.; and its gun-homicide rate is low. Yet, Norway’s gun laws did not prevent Anders Behring Breivik from obtaining a semi-automatic Ruger Mini-14 and other guns and shooting all those people.

Keep in mind also that gun-homicide rates in the U.S. have declined about 28 percent since the mid-1980s when only a few states issued concealed-carry permits. Now only the District of Columbia and Illinois don’t issue them; and Chicago and D.C. consistently are among cities with the highest gun-homicide rates.

Mass shootings like those in at Virginia Tech University; Tucson, Arizona, and Aurora, Colorado, of course, are very different from gun-homicides associated with gang violence, robberies, and other crimes.

Neely Tucker, writing in The Washington Post at the time of the Virginia Tech shooting, cited Jack Levin, the director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and conflict at Northeastern University in Boston, author of more than two dozen books on murder and criminology: Referring to mass murderers, he said "We're still in the dark about where this comes from."

Nevertheless, this fact doesn’t prevent many in the media and on the political left from jumping to conclusions about a mass killer’s political association. All too frequently and incorrectly, as ABC’s Brian Ross already has in the Colorado case, they jump to the conclusion the killer is a crazed right-wing fanatic or Tea Party activist.

And while the right is correct in pointing out that almost all political violence in America from the anti-Vietnam war to the Occupy Wall Street movements emanates from the left, it would be equally wrong to associate mass murderers with liberal politics.

The facts are that mass murders, like those we have experienced in the U.S. in recent years, are a category unto themselves. They have deep and long-standing psychological roots that differ by individual. Unlike the Fort Hood shootings or the 9/11 attacks, these crimes were not committed by members of a group driven by a common ideological or religious belief.

Whether or not Cho Seung-Hui, Jared Loughner, or James Holmes were were legally insane at the time they committed their crimes is for psychiatrists and juries to determine. It is difficult to argue, however, that they were mentally well-balanced individuals.

As columnist and former practicing psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer has often pointed out, our concerns for the civil liberties of the mentally ill has resulted in more lenient treatment of them. Instead of caring for them in institutions, as we once did, they are now walking, or living on, the streets among us.

Until we develop a system of crime prevention precognition like that in the movie “The Minority Report,” there is just no way of predicting who among us is a mass murderer until after the fact. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do more to prevent such crimes.

What we should have learned by now is that using these tragic events for partisan political purposes is counterproductive. It only diverts our attention from the underlying causes of mass shootings that we still do not well understand.

Stricter gun-control laws aren’t the answer. As criminals everywhere in the United States repeatedly demonstrate, those individuals intent on using guns to commit crimes can always get them. Where concealed-carry laws are in place and law-abiding citizen can defend themselves, however, overall gun violence is down.

It’s not the availability of guns in American society but the prevalence of countless other factors and negative influences from fatherless children to gratuitous violence in video games, television and movies that should concern us.

There are no easy answers to this problem. Mass murderers, and they alone, are responsible for their actions. We won’t begin to reduce the occurrence of  mass shootings, however, until we better understand the psychology of mass murder and take a critical look at how the society we have created influences it.