Weathered or Countered?

Another terrible shooting in the States on Friday.  I read this by Nick O'Malley in the SMH this morning, and thought it was interesting-

'Before the dead had even been carried from the cinema in Colorado on Friday afternoon a CBS broadcaster said in a solemn radio editorial:

''We'll eventually find out who James Holmes is, but he's not a terrorist, we're told, and thousands of other showings were peaceful, so really we have to start seeing these things as natural disasters, like an earthquake or a tornado.''

That this view was swept away in the deluge of sad commentary on Friday was surprising to me, an outsider. By this standard James Holmes was not a young man armed more heavily than the soldiers the US fields in Afghanistan, but an event, an act of God, to be weathered rather than countered.'

Here's the rest of the article.