Completely Missing the Point

Last Friday, December 14^th, in the Sandy HookSprings Elementary school in Newtown Connecticut, a lone gunman by the name of Adam Lanza shot and killed twenty-six people, most of them first-grade children, in what can only be described as pure evil on display.  The killer (notice that I did not say “alleged killer”), when emergency service people started to show up, then took his own life with the weapons he had just cut down so many innocent lives moments before.

The echoes of the weapon firing had not even stopped ringing through those halls before the president immediately began talking of the problem being a “gun control” issue.  The problem is not that people have the right “to keep and bear arms”.  The problem in the Sandy Hook Massacre is that there is a lack of personal responsibility being taught to our children.

Our culture condones everything in school except prayer by students and teachers in public school.  When God was kicked out of the public school systems back in the late 60’s and early 70’s, all we had left was a void which had to be filled.  You can read about a man who had a void in, of all places, the Bible, in Matthew 12:43-45, where a man who had a demon ejected from him life became worse because of the void that was produced by the vacancy of that evil spirit.  “When it (the evil spirit) arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order.  Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation.” (Matt 12:44-46 NIV)  Every book on biology and nature will tell you that nature will not abide a void.  Something will come in to replace that which has been displaced.  It has taken almost forty years, but something has filled the void that was created when God left.

Before the 50’s and throughout most of the 60’s, schoolroom discipline was generally not a problem.  The teacher had complete control of her classroom and dealt with problems head-on without so much as batting an eye.  Children who where unruly or disrespectful in those days found themselves sitting in the principal’s office waiting to get punished by a swift swat on the behind or standing quietly in a corner in the classroom. But when God was kicked out, people like the ACLU came in and said that paddling a child was a form of child abuse and making a child stand in a corner in front of the rest of the class could hurt the child’s self esteem.  These are probably the same people who said that any consensual sex, even in a marriage, was a form of rape.  The discipline problems of that era were talking out of turn, chewing gum, making noise, running in the halls, dress code infractions and littering. 

In the 1990’s, the problems were drug abuse, alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, and assault. Teachers were almost afraid to discipline their students for fear of retaliation.   When I was in high school from 1974 until 1977, there was an armed Cincinnati police officer who was part of the school staff as well as several security personnel who roamed the hallways to insure no one was outside his or her classroom while school was in session.  And that is still almost twenty years ago from where we are today.

The gun did not kill the children at Sandy Hook Elementary School any more than the bottle of whiskey drove a car into oncoming traffic and killed a family of four or the computer sent bullying messages by itself to a troubled teenager who committed suicide because of it.  These “tragedies” were caused by a human being acting in a way that is not even considered “animalistic”, since animals usually have a valid reason for the things they do or the way they act.  As long as we take personal responsibility out of the public arena, we will continue to have problems like these.  Adam Lanza sought to avoid such responsibility.  When the emergency response personnel showed up, he turned the gun on himself and killed himself.

All the reporters from the liberal press are saying that we need more gun control laws.  They are saying that we need more ‘gun free’ zones.  Unfortunately, to a psychopath like Adam Lanza, who killed his own mother while she slept in her bed, a ‘gun free’ zone is more like the ‘target rich environment’ he is used to in the violent video games he played in the basement of his home.  The National Rifle Association spokesman, Wayne LaPierre said it correctly when he said that “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”  The killer of twenty-six people, when he saw an armed response to his mayhem, took his own life rather than face the just consequences of his evil actions.  LaPierre said that policies banning guns at schools leave schoolchildren “utterly defenseless” and create a place that “insane killers” consider “the safest place to inflict the maximum mayhem with minimum risk.” (http://www.krdo.com/news/NRA-School-gun-bans-create-dangerous-places)