I no longer can stand by while some of my fellow Americans start laying blame for the Connecticut school massacre on the lack of officially sanctioned prayer in school.

I’ve seen it on Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets. What happened in Newtown, Conn., was an evil act that utterly defies human understanding. Twenty-seven lives were snuffed out by what one TV commentator called an act committed by “Satan himself.” Indeed.

Would this have happened had the federal court system ruled in the 1960s that school-sponsored prayer didn’t violate the Constitution’s prohibition against it? My guess is that it would.

Let’s understand what the courts ruled. The Supreme Court – led by Chief Justice Earl Warren – did not ban prayer in school. It did declare that teachers, principals and other public school authorities – as agents of the state – cannot order kids to pray. The First Amendment lays it out clearly: There shall be no law that establishes a state religion and there should be no prohibition of the “free exercise thereof.”

The bottom line is that students are free to pray whenever they wish. And students do pray to whichever deity they worship. That is their right and no one can deny it to them.

No, blame for the hideous massacre in Newtown doesn’t belong to judges who ruled correctly on school prayer. It is infinitely more complex than that.

Many other things have occurred throughout our society in the five decades since the court banned mandated public school prayer. We need to examine all of them, collectively and individually, and search within our own souls on how to prevent recurrences of the tragedy that overwhelms us.