It’s Not About Guns

I don’t know why, but yesterday’s church shooting really got to me.  A small town, people together in church worship.  How can someone walk in, look in their faces and shoot?  I don’t care what the anger or perceived injustice or justification, how can someone look into the eyes of a child or a grandmother or a family and just shoot them all? This was not a rifle from a high-rise being shot across a field, or a truck driven into an anonymous crowd.  This was up close and personal.   There had to be a complete emptiness in this killer’s soul, a lack of all things that we associate with humanity, or at least those things that we used to believe made us human.

Senseless violence.  It happens every day in America.  Sometimes we notice, because it is record-breaking, like yesterday’s church shooting.  Sometimes we don’t, like when it is just a black kid in a Chicago ghetto, or a mother who sells her daughter for drug money, or a man who rapes a child.  But, everyday this country is flooded with acts of inhumanity by someone who calls him or herself human but who has lost the soul that makes them so.

How did so many lose their souls?  How did America lose her soul?  For isn’t that the real problem. We will of course hear the calls for gun control.  But taking away everyone’s guns (even if that were possible) will not heal this broken soul.  Those bent on evil will find ways to carry out their evil intents, whether they have a gun or not.  Tightening gun laws is not a solution (indeed, the church shooter was denied a Texas gun permit, but somehow had a gun anyway).  Guns can be replaced: with knives, with Molotov cocktails, with homemade bombs, with trucks, with any manner of evil and mass destructive devices, directions for which are easily accessible on the internet.

Guns are nothing more than a symptom; they are not the cause.  We tend to look for easy solutions:  get rid of guns; if not guns, then just improve care for mental illness; tell everyone to say something if they see something; etc.  These are all superficial solutions and it is their very superficiality that belies the real problem:  our society has become one of superficiality and in losing depth it has lost its soul; it has become a place where there is a belief in one’s entitlement to immediate gratification, an entitlement to always feel good with a right to act out all feelings, negative and positive.  It has lost its core values, it has lost its soul.

If we really want to stop the violence, not just the mass shootings, but the everyday violence, along with the everyday hatred and anger that we all experience throughout our daily lives, then we need to look beyond the surface.  We need to look beyond the actions to what is causing them.  We have to ask:  What has happened to our soul?  How is it that we are teaching and accepting that feelings and personal gratification are more important than life itself?  What are we teaching and what are we not teaching our children?  What happened to America?

I have a few thoughts.   First, we seem to have lost our belief in anything beyond ourselves.  This is often stated as having lost our belief in God.  But it goes beyond a defined religion to a belief that there is something (whether a defined being or simply some force) that is greater than we humans.  With such a belief comes some sort of value system that among other things instills a respect for life.  Such value systems are more similar than different across nearly all belief systems and can often be in part boiled down into the golden rule:  do unto others as you would have others do unto you.  Implicit in such a belief is a respect for human life.  (Worth noting is that the Texas church shooter was an avowed Atheist who advocated for Atheism).  Beyond the respect for others, is the idea that when there is something more than what we know then life itself tends to take on a greater meaning and with such meaning comes hope.  When there is nothing more, and when life is hopeless, then there is seemingly little to prevent someone from destroying it.

I think that there is an enormous emptiness in many, an emptiness that they try to fill with various forms of gratification and consumerism.  But that emptiness cannot be filled with tangible superficialities.  It needs instead to be filled with intangible faith which with it brings hope and love.  Faith also brings with it a code of conduct that values human life and teaches respect and understanding of others.  This would do far more to end our inhumanity to one another than even the toughest gun laws imaginable.

We exacerbate the loss of a belief in something larger than oneself with the values that we do honor and teach our children.  Self-restraint and responsibility for one’s own actions are largely missing from our moral codes.  Instead, feelings have become a driving force:  competition and striving to do one’s best are often looked down upon because with winners there are losers and losers might have their feelings hurt and no one should ever feel bad.  Of course, if no one should feel bad, that means everyone must feel good.  Restraints on one’s behavior restrict that good feeling, so we become a do whatever you want society.  Thus, we have the current sexual exploitation in Hollywood – both on and off screen.   We have mothers who won’t tell their children NO because it might upset them and make them feel bad.  We have children who are passed from grade to grade without learning because holding them back would hurt their feelings.  We have people who are drug addicted because drugs make them feel good. 

And we have a society that always finds someone to blame, a society in which no one can seem to simply take responsibility for their own actions but rather will find a reason why they are somehow justified – that is, will always find somewhere else to place the blame.  In the same vein we have a large part of society that expects someone else to fix all their problems.  They place the responsibility for their very existence on someone else.

So, where is the responsibility for yesterday’s church shooting.  First and foremost, squarely on the murderer.  Not on the murderer’s weapon of choice.  If we want to stop these sorts of things from happening again, the answer is not simply gun or health care laws, nor is it simply crying for the victims as the media shows their photos, tells their stories, and plays at our heart strings.   We have had guns since the founding of this country; we rarely had mass shootings or the number of senseless non-mass but daily shootings and other violent acts that we have today.  If we want to really change things we need to look deeply within our souls and within the soul of the country itself and ask ourselves what is missing.