Horrible news out of Connecticut today. Horrible; unimaginable. Our prayers go out to everyone affected.
I’ll probably be sorry I said this, but people keep coming up with gun ban ideas. Which is perfectly understandable, but in all honesty I don’t think it’s well reasoned.
Unlike a lot of people, I’m old enough to remember when events like this were unheard-of. I think there may have been one school shooting during my childhood, but I never heard about it at the time. It wasn’t something that kids had to think about. It was less likely than getting hit by a falling airplane.
So clearly something has changed since that time.
And what has changed has not been the availability of guns. Hunting was much more popular then than it is now, and handgun laws were only in force in a few cities.
So what has changed is not that.
Something else must have changed.
Hmm… can you think what that might be?
The worst incident of school violence was in 1927 — and not gun related, as the killer made bombs.
I think what’s changed is that people have come to realize they can do this. The understanding that the possibility exists makes its own roads. Today’s killer appears to be a young man of twenty, who hated his mother so much that killing his own mother wasn’t enough for him: he had to go and kill all her schoolchildren afterwards to be satisfied.
Thank God we don’t, most of us, have that lurking in us. What we have is bad enough. May the Lord have mercy on his soul, if it is right that He should do so. What a tortured creature he must have been.
You had the 1966 University of Texas shooting, but, yeah, that’s about it.
At least in terms of big ones.
Here is a wikipedia list of school shootings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shootings_in_the_United_States#1960s
You had yours but they had 1 or 2 fatalities -at most.
Recently they have just gotten deadlier.
And since 1993, there has been a decline in school shootings. They just, as I wrote above, seem to get deadlier.
Fewer shootings but those few are more violent. So, the good news I guess is that fewer people are willing to commit murder on school campuses. The bad news is the ones that are tend to be on a suicide mission and want to rack up as many kills as they can before they go.
I heard many a call for more gun control today. To the contrary, I wonder if today’s tragedy wasn’t made possible, in part, by gun control. Those who desire to perpetrate such an act know that there will be no good guys within any school or hospital or any other restricted building who will have the firepower to stop them once they start. I’m reminded of the bumper sticker that was quite common back in the days of my youth – “When Guns Are Outlawed Only Outlaws Will Have Guns.”
I wonder too if another piece of the puzzle might relate to the fallout of the Me Generation. Young people nowadays have been told they were special from infancy. When they reach young adulthood only to find that their significance now rests upon their accomplishments and the world is not waiting to hand them a silver spoon, some feel cheated and angry. Some of those may be tempted to harbor bitterness and jealousy to the extent that they feel such an act is their only hope of achieving significance.
Of course I depart from my area of expertise in both of the above paragraphs. Where I have been trained is in expositing the Scriptures. In this past Sunday’s Gospel lesson from Luke 21 I read of Jesus warning of days to come when people would be perplexed and fearful. He went on to say that when these things happen we are to straighten up and lift our heads for our redemption draws near. He went on to warn his followers to beware lest dissipation, drunkenness and the cares of this world weigh down their hearts. Finally, he instructed them to pray for strength – Strength to escape the trials to come and Strength to stand before the Son of Man at the end of it all.
Today the nation is nothing if not fearful and perplexed. Evil deeds cannot be easily explained or easily prevented. But that’s not what Jesus called his followers to do during times of trial. He called them to keep looking up, to watch out for the things that will weigh us down and to pray.
That’s a good word, Greybeard. Thanks.
About the gun control part of the discussion (which I avoided yesterday–this news has greatly discouraged me), I found this page on gun murder and restrictive laws. It has remarkable graphs showing murder rates that seem unaffected by gun bans. “Since the outset of the Chicago handgun ban, the percentage of Chicago murders committed with handguns has averaged about 40% higher than it was before the law took effect.”
NOTE:
Another source I read listed that the avg number of mass murders per year has remained the same since 1976.
http://blog.oup.com/2012/09/seven-myths-of-mass-murder/
We also had deinstitutionalization int he late-60s and early-70s.