Hey America! I have a big hint for you. What we are doing isn’t working.

I know this column is a few days after the fact but how can anyone forget the deaths of three children and three adults at the Covenant School Monday in Nashville, Tennessee.

Anyone who has a child in school is going to think twice whenever they drop that child in front of the school or put their child on school bus. Hopefully, they will hug those children a little bit tighter and tell them how much they love them before they enter the school. And maybe they will be prompted to say a prayer of thanks when their child returns home safely at the end of the day.

A 28-year-old woman was the shooter at a school for pre-kindergarten through sixth grade. At the time I wrote this her motive was not clear. Females seldom commit mass shootings of any kind.

But it did make me recall an elementary school shooting in 1979 in San Diego, California by a female teenager who killed a principal and a custodian, while wounding eight children and a police officer on a Monday. She was not killed and is serving a life term. When asked why she did it, she coldly replied “I don’t like Mondays.”

In 1981 The Boomtown Rats, inspired by the killer’s statement, recorded a chilling song titled “I Don’t Like Mondays”.

My daughter lives in Green Hills, less than a mile from where the murderous rampage took place at Covenant Presbyterian Church. She called me to say it looked like every Metro police car and every fire truck in Nashville were converging near her condominium.

Her inquisitiveness about what was going on soon turned to raw emotions as the media started listing the death toll. Many of the parents and grandparents of the children held an anxious vigil in front of where she lives. She spoke with some of them and the last time she talked with me she was in tears.

There have been a lot of tears shed this week over this tragic event. We should weep and pray for those who lost family members. To paraphrase the Ghost of

Christmas Present in “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens, we should weep for the victims and their families, but we should also weep for ourselves.

How safe do you feel whenever you are out in public?

As in any tragedy of this magnitude people are going to be searching for who or what to blame. The availability of guns is usually the first culprit considered.

But we need to take a deep look at the shooter to determine why she felt the urge to commit such a tragic crime. We also need to wonder why a Walmart employee shoots his co-workers to why someone is driven by hatred to kill as many people at random as he can in grocery store.

We have to find answers to what, as the The Boomtown Rat sing, makes the “silicon chip in someone’s brain get switched to overload.” The answers are not going to be found on your mobile phone, some social media site, or a video game. In fact, they may truly be the real culprits as we continue to veer increasingly into insanity.

Talk to someone. Relate to people. Really care about those around you. Don’t let people feel isolated. Anything has to better than what we are doing now.