THE carnage in California will be claiming its victims for a long time to come. As investigators sift through the details of the perpetrators` lives in search of clues to explain the motivations of the couple that unleashed such unspeakable violence on a group of innocent people, the rest of us will similarly search for answers to provide a proper context and narrative to these gruesome actions.

Undoubtedly, the single-most important element of that context will be the ready availability of firearms in the United States. The fact that the shooters, subsequently killed by police, could amass high-powered weaponry and ammunition in such huge quantities over a period of time, in a state that has the strictest gun laws in the US, pierces through the storm clouds of confusion surrounding this tragedy. Stricter gun laws can do a lot to cut back on such incidents, but the rest of the world can only watch in stupefaction as American lawmakers stubbornly refuse to pass the required legislation time and again.

But the steady accumulation of this arsenal by the two suspects also indicates that this was not a spontaneous act. In fact, the couple may well have thought of letting loose a carnage of this sort for a long time, which in turn suggests they harboured grievances and developed justifications for the horrible act they carried out. Where they got their inspiration from to build this frame of mind will be a big part of the search for answers to their motivation, and given that both the perpetrators had a connection with Pakistan, and were strictly practising Muslims, the search could, at some point, touch Pakistan and the virulent strands of religion circulating with growing ferocity in the Muslim world. The tragedy clearly highlights the philosophical vacuum opening up in our midst, that pit of darkness from which grows the nihilistic inspiration of militant ideologies. In the days to come, as the investigators` search for clues yields up results, a concomitant search for answers must also begin in the hearts and minds of thinking Muslims everywhere. It appears we will now be adding two more names to a list that already includes the likes of Faisal Shahzad, Omar Saeed Sheikh and others of their ilk young minds infected easily by virulent ideologies of hate, and reflecting on the sources of vulnerability that turns them into mass murderers.