When disaster strikes, journalists have to write something about it—and write it fast. That means they have to take mental shortcuts, calling up established narratives and laying them out like old wrapping paper for new and more ambiguous facts. (Wife poisons husband. Revenge killing? Money killing? Self-defense killing? We stand at the ready with a lot of templates.) While the resulting gift isn’t always pretty, it’s generally good enough for deadline work.

But sometimes the shortcuts produce a journalistic stampede at the worst possible time. That’s what happened last weekend, when 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner shot six people to death at an Arizona Safeway and gravely wounded many more, including Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. The dominant storyline in the press—one that persisted in the face of all the facts—was that right-wing hysteria and lunacy had given rise to Loughner’s atrocity. Only on Wednesday night, when President Obama delivered a speech that effectively told everyone to cut it out, was the stampede halted (one hopes). But it’s still worth reviewing how the nation’s leading periodicals descended into such mindlessness.

Let’s go back to this Saturday. When news of the incident first broke, bloggers began to speculate that this was a Tea Party-related incident. No evidence of that emerged. Once a little more information trickled out, The New York Times and other outlets linked Loughner to a far-right publication called American Renaissance. That likewise had no basis in fact. Over the next day or two, as Loughner turned out to give off numerous indications of mental illness but very few of right-wing ideology, the dominant analysis became, “Okay maybe this guy was nuts, but, still, he was at least indirectly a product of a climate of political hysteria.”

By Monday, The New York Times’ editorial page had kicked into action. It conceded that, sure, Loughner operated “well beyond usual ideological categories,” but, still, it was “legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge.” The Los Angeles Times followed suit. It admitted that, sure, Loughner and “his own demons were primarily to blame,” but it still condemned the “increasingly incendiary and violent rhetoric that characterizes today's political debate,” for which “the right bears the brunt of responsibility.” Meanwhile, dozens of opinion writers were busily adding related but equally ethereal musings to the heap. Writing in the Guardian, blogger Jessica Valenti blamed a “country that sees masculinity—especially violent masculinity—as the ideal.”

There is of course one advantage to all such lines of argument, if argument is the word for it. They are entirely faith-based, which makes them pretty much irrefutable. But faith-based punditry works in more than one direction. Seven years after the massacre at Columbine High School—in which two senior students shot and killed twelve students and a teacher—CBS News invited Brian Rohrbough, who had lost his son Dan, to explain why he thought the shootings had happened. “The public school system has taught in a moral vacuum, expelling God from the school and from the government, replacing him with evolution, where the strong kill the weak, without moral consequences and life has no inherent value,” Rohrbough said. “And I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including by abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children.” Most liberals (myself included) would disagree with Rohrbough’s explanation for the shooting, but they’d have trouble explaining why it’s any less plausible or substantive than explanations blaming Jared Loughner on rightwing hysteria.