OK, enough time has gone by since the latest school shooting
(Sandy Hook) for all of us to get a little perspective on the larger
issue. Not the families of the
victims, of course, or the others who were personally involved, but the rest of
us. Unfortunately, that has not
happened, and most likely it won’t.
These incidents are so grief and anger laden that it is very difficult
to step outside that realm to allow deductive reasoning to rule over the raw
emotion that envelops us like a fog.
I do not blame anybody for letting emotion have its way after such a
horrific incident, and especially when it involves children. They were not my children, but they are in the greater sense that if we are all Gods
children, then the elders among us are all Gods children’s parents. I grieve for those children, but I
grieve for the shooter as well. He
was also somebody’s child.
Where did we fail, both the victims and the shooter?
Blame the guns if you must, but in doing so you would have
to exclude the signs and root causes that most, if not all, of these incidents
have in common. The incidents,
historically, have been perpetrated primarily by young men who have been
marginalized, in some way or another, by a culture, and greater society, that
does not value them as it does the social achiever, the athlete, the handsome,
and the well-connected. Most are
isolated loners who have been driven into private worlds by bullying and its
accompanying social ostracization, or by the invisibility that accompanies their
own social inhibition. Many
parents fall short in their ability to meet the needs of the child, and many
doctors fail the patient in their quick-fix practice of prescribing
psychotropic medications to mollify the concern and mask the symptoms of a greater
psychiatric challenge. Shame on
them.
Blame the guns if you must, but we live in a culture where
we begin medicating our children as soon as they enter school, leaving them
unattended in Grammar school, and left completely to their own devices in Jr.
High, and High School. We feed
them movies and video games to keep them entertained and occupied so that we do
not have to expend our precious energy actually parenting them. Of course, as they grow older, and even
more isolated, they naturally gravitate to more violent movies and interactive
video games; ‘games’ that enable the powerless to experience a sense of power,
as anti-social, and de-humanizing as that power might actually be.
Do you see the politicians stumbling over each other to keep
the kids off of these medications, and to get standards of decency enacted with
the movie and video game industries?
I think not. The gun
lobbies, as powerful as they are, are somewhat held at bay by the ideological
division within the government; but the pharmaceutical lobbies, to this day,
run unchecked in the halls of congress like a bitter wind fueling a high-desert
wildfire. The politicians owe the
pharmaceutical companies their own re-elections, and are not about to work
against their own political interests and ambitions.
And we all know about the governments relationship to
Hollywood.
Pathetic, at best.
Blame the guns if you must, but there is an even more
glaring, and egregious, connection to these horrific incidents than even the
social isolation, the medications, and the violent video game indulgences. The primary motivator, I believe, is
actually the acute realization that a maladjusted social outcast comes to have;
the understanding that it is no longer necessary for him to remain invisible in
his own powerless little world.
The media’s spotlight on the many previous incidents has thoroughly
enabled that understanding for him.
The exploitation of the events and the people involved, for purposes
both financial and political, serve very well to create, and perpetuate, the
very incidents they so righteously purport to be outraged by.
The shooter is identified, his picture sent around the world
to find its way onto the front pages of every newspaper and media website
imaginable. His face, and history
are broadcast over every television station in the country, and much of the
world. The shooter, even though
he’d taken his own life, is no longer invisible, but now has an international
obituary, and a life examined by all.
He has finally achieved his goal of visibility in the world.
He knew before hand that it would happen.
I can assure you that if the media would agree to no longer
publish the name, picture, history, or motivation of a shooter, there would be
few to none of these incidents to have to report on in the future. There would no longer be any payoff for
the perpetrator. These young men
do not want to kill children. If
they knew their own invisibility would just continue, they would find a more
acceptable way to gain the attention they so desperately need.
But that’s not going to happen with how things are
today.
Of that you can be assured.
The demonization of guns is the political objective, and
media-ratings is the financial one, for the predictable exploitation of these
horrendous incidents; not to mention the exposure and notoriety that the
individual reporters and so-called ‘journalists’ are sure to receive for their
self-serving efforts.
You can blame the guns if you must, but you will help
facilitate the guns being taken out of the hands of stable and responsible
Americans, people who won’t be there to protect you when you’re being
threatened by the criminal element, or the deranged. When the good guys don’t have guns, only the government and
the bad guys will have them. How
would you feel about that?
Take the politically correct, programmed ideology, out of
the equation, and how would you honestly feel about that?
Yes, blame the guns if you must, but I wish I could have
been at Sandy Hook to save the children with a concealed weapon of my own. And more likely than not, you’ve wished
the same thing about yourself, or somebody else.
Before that, however, I wish I could have been there in the
shooters life to help save that troubled young man from himself.
That is where it needs to begin.
