Last week, we covered a story coming out of Indiana where a 14-year-old would-be school shooter was met by police after a tip, thus aborting his massacre attempt. After a gunfight with police, the shooter took his own life, making him the only casualty.

We now know who the tipster was.

The Indiana State Police confirmed Friday afternoon that the mother of suspect [redacted] called in the tip warning police about a “potential violent act” at Dennis Intermediate School after the boy took another family member hostage and forced the family member to drive him to the school.

Dennis Intermediate already was on lockdown and police were on the scene when [redacted] arrived.

[Redacted] shot at a door to get into the school before exchanging gunfire with officers.

He died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

No one else was injured in the incident.

I was going to say that I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for the mother to make that call, but then I thought about it for a moment or two. It probably wasn’t all that hard. After all, he had taken a family member hostage. He was forcing someone else to participate in his atrocity, and he was probably going to take his life anyway.

It was probably more of a no-brainer than I originally thought.

That doesn’t diminish the importance of her call. That call saved lives. Possibly, a whole lot of lives. She stepped up and did what needed to be done by not pretending her son was a little angel who could do no wrong.

Granted, that’s easier to do when said “angel” has a gun and is taking family members hostage.

At the end of the day, she did what we want people to do, and this incident resolved pretty much the way we all would prefer these incidents be resolved.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t still questions. We don’t know where the gun came from, for example. We also don’t have any clue what pushed a 14-year-old to try and slaughter innocent people. Was he trying to be famous? Was he outraged with the entire world? The questions of “why” are still there, and will likely never be answered, unfortunately.

For me, that’s a big problem. We don’t know why these things happen. We do know that a significant number of these shooters–something like 90 percent or more if memory serves–come from single-mother homes, but we also know that most other people from such homes don’t flip out and try to kill everyone.

Isn’t it time that we press our research institutes to start looking into the minds of mass killers to try and figure out just what broke them so horribly? Once we know that, it’ll be far easier to start creating strategies for combatting mass shootings long before they ever happen so that we don’t need to worry about guns or any other weapon they might obtain.

Hat tip: The Truth About Guns