Yesterday, in a busy shopping mall in an affluent suburb of Omaha, Nebraska, a disturbed young man with a rifle started shooting unsuspecting shoppers on the levels below him. Before he shot himself to end the rampage, eight innocent people lay dead and five others were injured, two critically.

This is yet another example of senseless violence visited upon innocents.

Again, we may never know what kicked Robert Hawkins over the edge (he’d been kicked out of his house, lost his girlfriend and fired from the fast food restaurant where he worked) and turned him into a killer.

But it is certain that the lives of the relatives and loved ones of those killed were changed forever.

Omaha police say when they received panic-stricken calls from shoppers reporting the attack, they heard gunfire in the background. When they arrived only minutes later, it was too late to stop the carnage. Hawkins was dead, but so were eight others.

Unfortunately, some troubled people come to a point where they believe visiting horror and death on others - before ending their own miserable lives - will give them some sort of posthumous celebrity. There have been enough of these occurrences that we’ve become desensitized to reports about angry people who suddenly decide to end their lives - and the lives of as many innocents as possible in the process.

We seem to be turning out angry and disaffected young people ultimately not all that different from the “martyrs” who regularly blow themselves and anyone around them to smithereens in the Middle East. I’m not going any further into that comparison, but it seems no single group holds the exclusive on angry youth.

As this story unfolds, there will be the usual hue-and-cry from the people who will blame the gun Hawkins used for his crime. That’s ridiculous, but in such an emotionally-charged setting, logic won’t really count for much.

Rushing into the situation with our standard rhetoric would not only make all gun owners look insensitive, it would further dehumanize the tragedy of the situation.

The last thing we need to be doing is dehumanizing this tragedy.

People - just like the rest of us - were murdered yesterday in the Westroads Mall. In cold blood; with no warning, and for no reason.

We might not have known them personally, but it would seem it’s time to start taking occurrences like this very personally. Rather than move through our daily lives avoiding eye contact, ignoring bad behavior and turning our heads, it may be time that we step out of our comfort zones and start seeing the figures around us as people - just like us. It appears we ignore some of them at our own peril.

Both sides of the gun issue will probably never agree, but I think it’s time to focus on the causes for violence and not the tools that enable the violent.

If we don’t, “situational awareness” will have to become part of our children’s educational curriculum from kindergarten through college.

When the term “mean streets” was coined several decades ago, the writer had no idea that those mean streets would one day be located in “Anytown, USA” or they would be located inside malls, schools or college campuses. But today, no street’s exempt.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the grieving families in Omaha.