Finding the Answer

As we sat in horror, watching the news reports and then the president speak of the horrible shooting in Newtown, Connecticut the question of “why” certainly has to be on a lot of people’s minds. There will be the usual demands for all sorts of hopeful solutions from gun control, better training for … everyone you can imagine, possibly even the call for everyone to have some kind of built in GPS tracking device. The extent will be limitless.

But the real focus needs to be back on “why”. This country was born out of violence and has had a history of it. Violence and the knowledge throughout the world of our violent capabilities is one of the reasons our countries growth, survival, and in some cases success. But, there is a distinct difference between the violence seen on a battle field and in the pursuit of law & order and the kind of violence we are seeing in far too many young people. Kids are being taught that violence is a natural reaction to problems. They are surrounded by it; on television, in video games, acting out with their frinds, etc. In fact more than a few parents send their kids to all sorts of self-defense classes just to give them a fighting chance against school bullies, among other threats.

I remember a study my son did for a school paper once that looked at the percentage of the population that accepted killing. It spanned a period of some one hundred years, ever increasing with each event starting back before the civil war. The conditioning over the years has grown as the size and complexity of the events have grown. Unfortunately, during this period, some kind of large scale, intense educational effort has not followed so the children still grow up thinking it’s natural, perhaps even expected. As a boy I used to go rabbit hunting with my father. It was about the only time I was allowed to handle a gun and I handled it with great care and respect. I don’t remember how I learned that because he didn’t exactly teach me but I knew the rules and I followed them. During high school and college I kept those rules, even when I bought my own .22 rifle for target shooting. I knew that care had to always be taken and I did. Even when I entered the Army where killing is a craft one learns to protect themselves as well as vanquish the enemy, there was an understanding that this surrounded a necessity, not just killing for the perceived joy of killing.

We are not the position of having the privilege of declaring ourselves a pacifist state. Current events and future responsibilities have already eliminated that option; but we in a position to start working on changing attitudes and teaching everyone the need to respect life and not to take it arbitrarily. We don’t have to eliminate all firearms, but we do need to ask a few intelligent questions.

Handgun control only demonstrated that the criminal could get their hands on guns while private citizens could not and made everyone a little more vulnerable. Having a gun does even the playing field, but when is enough too much? Teaching our children to respect life is essential, but so is teaching them to be able to stand up to defend themselves.

If the Executive & Legislative branches are going to try to tackle this issue, we need to insist them tackle the entire issue. We must insist them look at not only weapons, but include entertainment, social media, peer pressure, civil resource and much, much more. We’re talking about turning our world upside down and shaking out all the bad. Somehow I believe the framers of the constitution may have thought a bit about this, but I doubt they considered we would have a society where children witness over 100,000 murders before the age of 16 and now with their games, probably commit at least that many well before that 16th birthday.

Good luck to all of us!