Pastor Brad Burkholder is less interested in what the recent massacre in his Kansas town says about the shooter than in what the shooting says about humanity. Brow furrowed, deep in thought, he stares at the floor of the Hesston Mennonite Brethren church. “Nobody deserved this, but instead of thinking ‘I could never do that’, instead I pray that it’s never me. Because I could get to a place where that could be me.”

Unlike the Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado in December, or the attack on a government building in San Bernardino in December, Thursday’s violence in Hesston, Kansas, which took the lives of four and injured 14, lacks a political charge.