Last month, 22-year-old UCSB student Elliot Rodger stabbed three men to death at his home in Isla Vista, Calif., then got into his BMW, drove through town and shot and killed two women and another man. Aside from the 6 people he killed, 13 others were injured during his shooting rampage. Right before the shooting, he posted a YouTube video called The Day of Retribution and also sent out a lengthy manifesto revealing his plans to go on a killing spree.

Not much time has passed since the incident, and groups of people all over the Internet have been analyzing Rodger’s behavior and arguing over who is to blame for his actions.

Many are speculating that police and therapists could have stopped the attacks in advance. Others are pointing fingers at Rodger’s privilege and isolation, our country’s shoddy gun control laws, and even Rodger’s possible shame around homosexuality.

The most popular debate is about whether or not misogyny influenced Rodger’s decision to kill.

Select groups of females have become offensive, saying that the shooting was purely a sexist hate crime and nothing more. Some feminists blame the crime on the Men’s Rights Movement. Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday called out sexism in the entertainment industry, citing the specific influence of Judd Apatow’s frat-boy films and how they set unrealistic expectations for “shlubby arrested adolescents” to “get girls.”

Select groups of males are on the defensive as well, with some saying misogyny wasn’t an issue AT ALL (even when Rodger made chauvinist statements like: “If women continue to have rights, they will only hinder the advancement of the human race by breeding with degenerate men and creating stupid, degenerate offspring”). An Internet troll has become so aggressive and hateful towards feminist activists that he’s even been creating Elliot Rodger fan pages to “rustle the jimmies of feminists around the world who are attempting to hijack this tragedy in order to further their own agenda.”

What’s interesting about the public’s response to the UCSB shooting (other than the fact that people seem to think they can properly analyze a killer’s mind by watching a few videos and reading a manifesto from an untrustworthy narrator) is the clear presence of the either/or fallacy in many of the arguments.

Also known as “a false dichotomy” or “black and white thinking,” the either/or fallacy oversimplifies an issue by reducing alternatives to only two options. The fallacy rejects the idea that the points of both parties are valid, and rejects the possibility that another party could also hold a valid point.

When it comes to the UCSB chaos, many are taking a strong (and sometimes hostile) either/or stance on what caused the shooting: it was gun control or it wasn’t gun control; it was misogyny or it wasn’t misogyny; it was mental illness or it wasn’t mental illness.

The public’s reaction isn’t shocking; it’s actually common to express illogical hostility in times of tragedy. In fact, society responded similarly to past incidents in desperate attempts to simplify the reasoning behind other cold blooded murders (e.g. the media claiming to know the exact motives of the Sandy Hook shooter and the Columbine killers). It would be ignorant to expect that people won’t argue over what caused the UCSB catastrophe.

The only issue here is that people are so busy analyzing Rodger’s behavior that they’ve forgotten to be mindful of their own. Arguing over WHO is wrong about WHAT was wrong with Rodger is adding more angst to the pain already caused by the shooting. It’s also limiting our understanding of how to prevent similar incidents in the future; if we focus on ONE problem, none of the others have a chance to be solved.

The fact that females and males are going up against each other on the misogyny issue is even more ironic, since Rodger fantasizes in his manifesto about a world where men and women recognize each other as enemies. So, the groups of males and females currently fighting each other are unintentionally giving the killer what he wanted.

Why isn’t it possible that Rodger was a misogynistic, privileged, isolated, angry, closeted-homosexual psychopath who shouldn’t have been allowed access to guns? What if we actually recognized mass murderers as confusing, complex beings that can’t be summed up so easily?

Intelligent discourse over what caused the shooting should be encouraged; these discussions can help us to take action to prevent problems in the future. But situations like these are convoluted, and it would be nonsensical to assume there was only one evil ingredient in the Rodger recipe — and it would benefit us all to realize this sooner rather than later.