(By Mateen Elass, posted on his blog). As America mourns and seeks answers to make sense of the carnage inflicted on innocent tourists in Las Vegas, some have been quick with offering solutions to prevent similar slaughters in the future. Unfortunately, such outcomes will never be possible, even if every gun were magically removed from the world. The problem is found not in the hand that pulls the trigger, or guides the steering wheel, or pushes the remote control detonator, but rather in the human heart and its seemingly infinite capacity for hatred. A soul filled with malice can invent a thousand ways to inflict mayhem on its targets.
As I listened this week to newscasters ask their talking head experts, “Why is it that the number of mass murders has been increasing recently?”, and to their guests’ befuddled responses, it became clearer to me that in the quest to “solve this problem,” we are only treating symptoms while remaining ignorant of the disease. The debate on gun control, background checks, bump stock modifications and high-capacity magazine clips, while a good exercise (in my opinion), will at the best lead to banning one method of mass killing. Of course, that is nothing to sneeze at, but a human heart filled with seething rage will find other means of destruction (think of Timothy McVeigh, the Boston Marathon bombers, the Nice truck driver, and of course the 9/11 hijackers).
In doing a bit of research, I discovered that the newscasters’ pressing question was actually based on a false premise: There is actually no statistically significant increase in the number of mass murders committed in the USA since 1970. But there certainly is a growing sense that our country is a more conflicted and less safe place to live. No doubt the relentless 24/7 worldwide news cycle has much to do with this perception, and the ensuing reality.
As a solution, some have proposed more laws and law-enforcement, and greater government surveillance in order to protect the public from evil plots. Even though no one likes to give up some freedoms to privacy and easy access to public space, some sacrifices are necessary in such an age of violence and insecurity, so the argument goes. Others say that these freedoms are too precious to sacrifice, and we must just get used to an increased threat matrix in our lives.
How do we find ourselves in this downhill slide? I think the answer, to quote the words of Carl Sandburg, is that we have forgotten where we came from:
When a nation goes down or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.
Why today do we see such a willful disregard of life, where far too many human beings are casually snuffed out before they even exit their mother’s womb, where innocent children become the victims of sexual predators, where teenagers die from gang violence or drug overdoses in such large numbers that their deaths become simply “more statistics,” where mature adults are targeted because the skin they are wrapped in is of the “wrong color,” or their belief system somehow disqualifies them from inclusion in the human race? Why does our society see the elderly and infirm as civic detritus, to be swept aside or quietly ignored rather than cherished and appreciated?
The incivility among our political leaders seems epidemic today, but it only reflects what is found in our larger culture (have you checked out the comments sections of controversial news stories reported on the Internet, or been of late to any public lectures on hot-button topics?). Debate descends into name-calling and vilification.
And yet we seem amazed and shocked when hatred breaks out into real-life violence.
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Classic 19th century Liberalism, religious and secular, adopted the Quaker understanding of human anthropology. That people by and large are born morally or ethically good, or neutral at worst. It is the actions of society at large, culture, corporations, or adopting the language of that age, the Industrial Revolution that debased people or make them bad or do bad things.
Fast forward to 2017, serial killers, mass shootings, ISIS, world in chaos, financial crises, and the Left assumes that the answer to be found, or management of such chaos is in broad regulation, policy, laws, and this conflict with Second Amendment folks is played out on grounds of broad public policy debates. That only if gun law X existed, or background checks, or assault weapons bans, or if the govt. just took away people’s guns, such as Australia or England, then these things just would not happen. Well to the best of my knowledge people are still killed in enlightened Europe by guns, bombs, trucks, cars, knifes, what have you. Maybe they should ban table ware now.
What the religious Left will not engage in to a great degree are discussions or polemics about such matters as mental health issues, total depravity, personal original sin on a religious or spiritual level, because to do so sooner or later engages broader issues of abortion and human sexuality, or dare I say human sexual depravity, Their LGBTQ lobby just will not go there. So the religious Left has very little to say, very little to comment on on Vegas, Sandy Ridge, Pulse Orlando, save never to waste a crises and call your congressman for greater gun control laws. And confession of any personal sin, reflection, coming to Jesus moments is reserved for white males only, by and large for their inherent complicity in oppression and greater victimization narratives. And that is the space where the PCUSA exists in now, the box more or less of their discussions. On sex, guns, race, any other topic one could choose.