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This ended the carnage but greatly diminished the prospects that anyone will ever know why he chose to commit such horrible acts.

If you're looking for a rational motivation for an insane act committed by a mentally ill person then something's not right with your head, doc.

There’s insanity, and then there’s irrationality. There is a difference. Caligula was just as violent as this Connecticut fruit-loop, and so was King Herod with his slaying of the innocents. But Herod had his own logic - “If anyone else thinks they’re going to be king, they will have to kill me - and I will kill them first!” Likewise, the Connecticut fruit-loop had a plan - to become famous and make “everyone” care about what made him tick. So if the good doctor wants to analyze what could be done differently to prevent this sort of thing, best he would start by analyzing the effects of what the journalists and the politicians do in response to such outrages. Instead of joining the chorus of journalists and politicians who are doing wrong, or at best irrelevant, things.
If you don’t assume a priori that your favorite government civil rights violation will inevitably improve things and have no unintended consequences, maybe you will consider that the vast number of legally owned guns has resulted in remarkably - according to your illiberal “liberal” logic - few casualties. From there you might consider the extent to which gun ownership as an antibody against violence. Antibodies can certainly have ill effects in the form of autoimmune disorders, but the existence of such disorders does not make you think that antibodies are something the body would be better off without. But when you frame the issue as how to reduce gun violence, rather than violence overall, you are doing exactly that - trying to reduce autoimmune disease, at the risk of worsening disease in general.
The United States has long relied on public health science to improve the safety, health, and lives of its citizens. Perhaps the same straightforward, problem-solving approach that worked well in other circumstances can help the nation meet the challenge of firearm violence. Otherwise, the heartache that the nation and perhaps the world is feeling over the senseless gun violence in Newtown will likely be repeated, again and again.
If you really took a public health approach, the first thing you would notice would be politically incorrect - the fact that violence is not uniformly distributed among ethnic groups. Your public health approach would then be to quarantine the people among whom the violence is concentrated. Oh, that isn’t what you meant?? Surprise, surprise!! I guess your approach to violating civil rights is much more, I guess you would call it, “nuanced.”