A few years ago, a photographer in China captured a sign in a government office with one of those amusing translation errors. The sign said, in Chinese, 伤残评定办 (“Disability Assessment Office”), which was rendered in English as “Office of Mayhem Evaluation.” I found this phrase so charmingly bureaucratic that when I started writing about terrorism, I considered having it posted on my office door.

We at the American bureau of the Office of Mayhem Evaluation have suffered through a busy and perplexing few days. On Saturday, 72-year-old Huu Can Tran allegedly shot and killed 10 people in Monterey Park, California. On Monday, 66-year-old Chunli Zhao allegedly shot and killed seven people in Half Moon Bay, about 400 miles up the California coast. The first shooter is dead and left only fleeting traces of a motive. Zhao is in custody, and his motives are similarly resistant to evaluation, although according to early reports he is an ornery type. Apparently he was once accused of threatening to attack someone with a knife, and of attempting to smother him with a pillow (that most comfy of deadly weapons). Adding to the perplexity are these men’s age and ethnicity: both senior citizens, and both ethnically Chinese.

[Read: An Asian American grief]

Humans are by nature self-obsessed and prone to seeking meaning and patterns, especially in atrocities. I chalk up some of the early reactions to these tendencies: Commentators saw that Asian Americans were murdered, and speculated (wrongly, it appears) that the shootings were the most recent in the string of random, racially motivated attacks against Asian Americans, especially old folks. Surely when someone commits mass murder, he has a reason, even a bad one. So we speculate, sometimes in ways that inflame our anxieties, and wait for someone to discover the killer’s manifesto or rants on social media.

Sometimes that discovery arrives. But in my career of mayhem evaluation, I have found that a manifesto, or indeed a coherent motive, is a courtesy many mass killers fail to pay. The expectation that killers will explain themselves in clear, grammatical prose, as Anders Behring Breivik did, or in poetry, as members of the Islamic State did, will lead us on many a snipe hunt. Most shooters don’t think straight. For that matter, most nonshooters don’t either.

That is true even of those who meticulously plan their massacre. To date, the highest body count in an American mass shooting is held by a 64-year-old professional gambler at Las Vegas’s Mandalay Bay in 2017. Like the men suspected of this past weekend’s killings, he was unusually old. When the Las Vegas police issued their report on the atrocity, they came up with no motive whatsoever: no hatred of country-music fans, of particular races or religions, or even of humans in general. He was indiscriminate in all senses. Still others on the psychopath spectrum seem to have killed purposelessly, like the German who lethally injected several dozen care-home residents out of “boredom.” Coleridge called this species of evil “motiveless malignity,” and it describes minds far less sophisticated than Iago’s.

Such vacuous mayhem leaves little to evaluate. But in the aftermath of these horrors, we can at least try to maintain standards of decency by observing a few precautions. The first is to show restraint in drawing conclusions based on the killer’s or victims’ names, ethnicity, race, or religion. Yes, a shooter named Abdelhamid Abaaoud is more likely to be a jihadist than one named Huu Can Tran. But there are irritable loners of many races and creeds, and there’s little harm in waiting a day or two to make sure that you’ve distinguished the ordinary lunatics from the ideological fanatics.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: On murders, especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel]

The second is to remember, contrary to all instincts, that the story might not be about you—not about your pet subject, not about your community, not about the issues that affect you and occupy your thoughts, no matter how important or worthy those issues may be. When five staff members of the Capital Gazette were murdered in Annapolis, Maryland, in 2018, I watched the news and assumed that journalism was under attack. More precisely, it turned out, journalists were under attack for reporting accurately on a violent creep, who responded murderously. The beef was mostly personal. The victims died in the line of duty, but my preoccupation with press freedom—for which I make no apology—made me assume that the massacre was an attack on the profession itself.

Similarly, Asian Americans can die without Asian Americans as a class coming under attack. I grieve for the individuals slain in California; I am outraged about the beatings of Asian grannies on city streets. But decency forbids my treating the first group’s apparently unrelated deaths as an opportunity to bring attention to the second.

These recent killings, which may or may not remain in the “motive undetermined” category, do raise one issue that is salient irrespective of motive. Americans continue to arm themselves as if the apocalypse is coming in a matter of months, and as if the police have gone on permanent sabbatical. Recently, a relative of mine in New England went to a local bank branch to get documents notarized for her concealed-carry permit. The nice man at the counter, who also offered her favorable intro rates on a new checking account, told her that he was on intimate terms with the application process. “Since the pandemic, everyone’s been coming in to get their gun permits,” he said. Then he confided, probably in contravention of some Bank of America customer-service policy, that he was licensed to carry his Glock in 37 states.

Ideological killers will find guns, one way or another. They’re hard to stop, because they never stop thinking about killing. And as guns become more ubiquitous, the motiveless and impulsive spree killers will be more likely to have one nearby when the impulse strikes—and so they will make up a growing share of these awful incidents. We need to be ready to evaluate both types of mayhem with caution and restraint. And as a matter of policy, the government should try to ensure that the embittered psychos who live among us are armed with nothing more dangerous than a pillow.

The suspect in the Half Moon Bay, California, mass shooting was charged Wednesday with seven counts of murder and one count of attempted murder in what became the deadliest attack in San Mateo County's history, the district attorney said.

News of mass shootings, as frequently as they happen in the U.S., has been shown to produce acute stress and anxiety. But for many Asian Americans, this past week’s deadly attacks in California—first in Monterey Park, then in Half Moon Bay—feel profoundly different. The tragedies occurred around the Lunar New Year, during a time meant for celebration. And not only did they happen in areas that have historically been sanctuaries for Asian residents, but the suspects in both cases are themselves Asian.

These events have added fuel to what my colleague Katherine Hu described as “an invisible, pervasive dread” among many Asian Americans, including myself. For days I’ve been struggling to process—and produce fully formed thoughts about—the shootings. How should I respond, as someone of Chinese descent, living mere miles away from Monterey Park? When I was asked to potentially reflect on my personal experience for The Atlantic, I hesitated. After all, I’d gone about my day after reading the news, even putting off calling my folks. Was that wrong?

My confusion may have stemmed, in part, from the inexplicability of these crimes, Christine Catipon, the president-elect of the Asian American Psychological Association, told me. “There’s absolutely a lot of cognitive dissonance happening,” she said. “Why would someone do this on Lunar New Year? … Why would [the alleged perpetrator] be someone from our community?”

[Read: An Asian American grief]

Indeed, the other psychologists I spoke with also acknowledged the painful, conflicting emotions that might arise from these incidents. “For a large part of the Asian American community, we don’t have a very public, practiced language” around a tragedy such as the Monterey Park shooting, said William Ming Liu, a counseling-psychology professor at the University of Maryland. “We’re trying to figure out, like, Who are we? How do we come together? What does it mean for us?” he told me. “These complex traumas take time to process.” The result, he said, has been greater anxiety, hypersensitivity, and “a spike in fear” that is affecting many in the Asian diaspora in subtle but potentially severe ways.

The shootings happened close to Lunar New Year, a holiday that is celebrated in different ways among different ethnic communities but that’s generally considered to be a moment of renewal and conviviality. For me, this meant cleaning my home to welcome good fortune, cooking traditional dishes, and gathering with my closest friends. The violence that occurred on Lunar New Year’s eve in Monterey Park forced many to reconcile jubilation with terror. “This should be a time of celebration … about joyousness and family and coming together,” said Sherry Wang, an associate professor at Santa Clara University. “This is such an exponential level of cultural pain that is juxtaposed with a cultural celebration that cuts across borders.”

In addition, many Asian Americans are still wrestling with the knowledge that they’ve been—or could be—targets of attacks spurred by racist language about the pandemic’s origins. Hearing news of violence against any Asian population in the U.S. might produce a shock and suspicion that builds on that underlying anxiety. Liu told me his initial thought after learning of the first shooting was, “This [has to be] somebody from outside the community who found this community of Asian Americans.”

Wang also assumed that, given the racist motives for some previous attacks, what happened in Monterey Park was a hate crime. Thus, when the alleged shooter was revealed to be an Asian man, those existing, potent negative emotions became further twisted, requiring “a lot of mental gymnastics,” Wang said. “We have to push against our own [ideas] of how violence can happen to our communities, when it’s from somebody within our community.”

She added that many Asian cultures value respect for elders; the idea that they could hurt their own is almost incomprehensible. In other words, these developments can challenge assumptions within the Asian community that certain spaces are safe for them. I’d always believed ethnic enclaves such as Monterey Park were uniquely protected. I’d never thought that ballroom dancing, the activity many of the victims there were participating in, could somehow lead to death; my dad danced for years at our local cultural center.

And then there is the issue of rhetoric: The term Asian American, despite being established in the late 1960s by Asian American activists hoping to consolidate political power, can be limiting. The label could cause many different ethnic groups to be seen as a single society and be expected to have a shared response—as well as a shared understanding of events such as these shootings. Yet, Liu explained, the possible motives behind these crimes can be hard to talk about even among ostensibly similar cultures. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there are all sorts of collective traumas and individual traumas a lot of our elders have experienced but have never processed and never dealt with,” he said, listing traumas associated with their backgrounds and their experiences immigrating to the U.S. as examples.

Incidents of anti-Asian attacks during the pandemic, Wang said, introduced a generation of Asian Americans to language about racial trauma but not necessarily about other forms of brutality, such as domestic violence, which became a point of discussion in response to the Monterey Park shooting. She said that race is just one factor, complicated by other issues such as gender, national origin, and immigration status.

At this point, it can feel as though there are more questions than answers when it comes to understanding these shootings. Still, the experts I spoke with emphasized the importance of providing more mental health care to Asian American communities, as well as the need for them to “step back and recharge in whatever way you need to,” as Wang put it. “I think we have to be aware of our limits and our boundaries,” Catipon added, recommending the AAPA’s list of resources for help. “Sometimes it’s okay to find things that give us joy … I would just encourage people, if they’re noticing that they’re having a hard time functioning, to get support. [Asking for help] doesn’t mean that you’re weak. It doesn’t mean anything like that if you’re affected by these things. It means you’re human.”