School Shooting: It Will Happen Again

“There is evil in the world. It’s beyond mental illness, beyond gun control. It is evil.” – John R. Coyne, Jr.

I hadn’t intended on getting back to blogging until after the holidays, but I had to post about this.  After the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut last Friday that left twenty six people murdered, twenty of them children, I have seen no end to the people who think the solution to preventing this in the future is either confiscating guns or passing more restrictive gun laws.  This is narrow thinking and an emotional knee jerk reaction.  Believing such measures would prevent further tragedies is wishful thinking brought on by a desire to believe that future mass murders can be prevented if we would just deny the murderers their weapons.  Asking “with what?” instead of “why?” is a much easier question to answer but serves only to give a false sense of security to those who ask it, who search in vain for a reason to believe the horror of dead children won’t happen again.

It will happen again.  It’s inevitable and just a question of when, where and how many will be killed.  Anyone with a realistic view of our society can admit that. 

Our society has evolved into a culture of killing.  A culture of selfishness.  A culture with attention-seeking, evil hearted people who won’t hesitate to kill and destroy on a mass scale if it gets them noticed.  The people who believe getting rid of guns is the answer don’t understand this.  They don’t want to understand this.  They choose to stick their heads in the sand and ignore the undeniable fact that there are evil people in our society who would kill them and their children in the most heinous ways if it served their selfish, wicked purpose.  No law can change this.  No amount of funding to any program can change this.  This is the society we have created and we are stuck with it.  It will only get worse.

We have created a self-centered society that tells people they can do what they want.  No one has the right to tell anyone they can’t do something anymore.  No one can tell someone they are wrong anymore. 

I don’t think anyone could sum it up better than Mike Huckabee:

“But the cause and effect we see in the dramatic changes of what our children are capable of is a part of a cultural shift from a God-centered culture to a self-centered culture. We have glorified uninhibited self-expression and individualism and are shocked that we have a generation of loners. We have insisted on a society where everyone gets a trophy and no one loses and act surprised that so many kids lack self-esteem and feel like losers. We dismiss the notion of natural law and the notion that there are moral absolutes and seemed amazed when some kids make it their own morality to kill innocent children. We diminish and even hold in contempt the natural family of a father and mother creating and then responsibly raising the next generation and then express dismay that kids feel no real connection to their families or even the concept of a family. We scoff at the need for mothers and fathers to make it their priority to train their children to be strong in spirit and soul and responsible for right and wrong and exalt instead the virtue of having things and providing expensive toys, games, and electronics that substitute for parenting and then don’t understand why our kids would rather have ear buds dangling from their ears, fingers attaching to a smart phone, and face attached to a computer screen than to have an extended conversation with their family at dinner. And we don’t teach them there is a Creator God who sets immutable rules, a God who is knowable, and to whom we are ultimately responsible. Instead we teach that God was not involved in our origins, that our very lives are biological happenstances and in fact are disposable should they be inconvenient to us, and that any outrageous behaviors are not sin, but disorders for which we should be excused and accommodated. I realize my viewpoint sounds out-dated and archaic, but when that world view was the foundation of our nation’s social contract, we got in trouble at school for talking in class, chewing gum, pulling a girl’s pigtails, or slouching in our school desks. We took guns to school, to be sure, but they were in the gun racks of our trucks and we used them to hunt before and after school. It never occurred to us to use them to murder our teachers and fellow students. So yes, I can stand the contempt and criticism of the left. I’ll gladly accept their scorn as they substitute creative language with a steady stream of profanity-laced tirades that I’m an idiot, a throwback to the past, and a person who should be forever silenced. But when we as a nation feared God, we didn’t fear that a 20 year old with a high powered rifle would gun down our children in their schoolrooms.”

The solution to stopping school massacres lies in the culture, not in gun control or passing more laws.  Evil people don’t obey laws.  But how do you change the culture?  How do you turn a licentious culture into one of responsibility and morals?  You can’t.  Call me a pessimist if you want, but history proves it will not happen. 

The ramifications were lost on people as our society evolved into a self-centered culture of uninhibited individualism.  There is a high price to pay for such ‘freedom’ and last Friday that price added twenty six lives.

At the memorial service in Connecticut on Sunday night, President Obama said, “We can’t tolerate this anymore.”

I wonder what he’ll say at the next memorial service.