Losing Control

            Reflecting upon the horrors that shook Sandy Hook Elementary School and the other mass killings of recent years, a flood of solutions have been offered to deter future episodes of this kind.  Some of the more common knee-jerk remedies on the table include increased levels of gun control, more dramatic mental health treatment, and ramping up public security.

The irony of such recommendations is that they’re all based on approaches that have been tried before and have had a sizable level of ineffectiveness.  Adam Lanza, the Newton shooter, was legally barred from owning firearms and the school he attacked enforced a type of gun control as an established “gun free zone”.  He was also drowning in a sea of therapy and mood altering drugs.  Not to mention, the very fear of being committed is what, apparently, sparked his desire to go on this deadly rampage in the first place.  Furthermore, Sand Hook had just begun instituting a slew of updated security features--features that had been refined for years and were considered the newest and best when it came to effective protections. 

However, none of these precautions that were so popular before the shooting, and are now being repackaged as deterrents to future shootings, did what they were supposed to do.  Sure, we can double our efforts in taking away guns, doping people up, and turning public places into super-security zones but these measures only deal with the surface issues of mass killing.  That’s why these tragedies continue to occur and become increasingly barbaric.  They seem to only deal with symptoms and not the cause.

It’s certainly true that some of the surface level band-aids being thrown around will appear as legitimate fixes at a glance.  Emboldening these measures would probably minimize the ability and motivation of some killers.  Unfortunately, we’ve been programmed in the modern world to think that passing a new law will make for a better society, but it simply will not.  Making better people is what makes a better society.  The fundamental problem with Adam Lanza wasn’t that he could acquire firearms, or wasn’t receiving appropriate psychiatric treatment, or lived in an environment that was mired in too much insecurity.  The fundamental problem with this mass child murderer was that he didn’t have the will to do good.  In other words, he had a broken soul.

These days, interjecting the condition of the soul into a discussion like Sandy Hook usually brings responses like disbelief, indifference, or boredom.  I can only imagine the scores of eyes that must be rolling.  But in historical American society, which was far from perfect but superior in many ways, the state of the heart was considered paramount to creating good people and a better community.  It is certainly true that gun deaths are nothing new and the mentally ill have always been with us, but what has changed is the vast number of suicides and murder/suicides, the random targeting of innocent children, and the widespread categorization of so many of the population as mentally unstable.  So, what’s different now that’s led our country down such a dark path?

In the 19^th century European philosophers began to adopt new views on human existence.  Before that time Western culture almost unanimously agreed that God is a reality and His morality, the Judeo-Christian ethic, is the best tool to positively influence society.  Slowly, though, the departure from this founding notion began to take shape in America through academia, the arts, science, and law.  Then the 20^th century saw the first atheistic countries, by way of the Soviet Union and other communist nations.  They made official the echoes of decades earlier that there is no meaning to life and God is dead.  It is no coincidence that these “godless” endeavors were destined to be the greatest hotbeds of mass murder the world had ever known.  These entities started proxy movements in the West in places like America.  So, now there rose a political defiance to traditional thought, adding to the counterculture that had already been brewing in certain sectors.  These elements of radical socialism and atheism birthed what we know today as the ideological left. 

This faction has worked tirelessly to remove traditional thought from society and with it our commonly shared moral compass.  What began with the elimination of prayer and scripture reading in public schools, has now digressed into the vilification of the very mention of Christmas.   In addition, atheism has effectively fought to change the public perception of Hell from reality to myth, eliminating one of society’s greatest hedges against egregious behavior.  Many in our modern world might find the notion of Hell fantastic, but the question remains:  Are the actions of Adam Lanza more likely in a society that still has a general fear of everlasting consequences or more likely in one that ignores and even stigmatizes the belief of these age-old repercussions?  Keep in mind that just about every civilization to walk the planet has held some notion of an afterlife and the possibility of punishment therein.  Ever since the Egyptians, mankind has acknowledged this standard, almost unanimously.  

It’s not until this age have we seen ample arrogance to defy such traditions on a grand scale.  The left has even gone so far as to tear down the very notion of right and wrong by equivocating good with bad.  The moral relativism of modern thinking allows that something might be wrong on one occasion but the same act might be fine in another setting, devaluing the very notion of principles altogether.  You see this manifest in the present discussion where the debate turns to guns and psychiatry and hardly touches on the morality of the killer, because most people reporting the story don’t even believe in the traditional barometers of right and wrong anymore.  It’s sad, but these shooters grew up in a strange new world that doesn’t necessarily teach that senselessly robbing a group of random children of their lives is something that is absolutely wrong, because the notion that something can be deemed absolutely wrong is no longer a widely shared view, thanks to left-wing academia’s influence on popular perception.

This lack of public conscience is more detrimental to our way of life than many casual observers would care to admit.  Our Constitutional right to bear arms only works if we are willing to govern ourselves. In other words, the Constitution was set up to give broad rights to citizens (as opposed to what you may be hearing these days) but that openness is dependent upon the other half of the equation being fulfilled, which is self-rule.  And the founders recognized that if there wasn’t a religious element steering the public conscience then the self-governance applied would be inadequate and the government would take a larger and larger share of control over the people.  This is what has appeared to happen over the last century.  As a people, we’ve turned our back on God-given morality, making us less able to rule ourselves, and, as a result, government intervention has taken a larger share of authority over our lives.  It seems Washington is more than happy to adapt to the situation and fill the vacuum in leadership.

Beyond this fundamental reshuffling of American life, leftist thought has promoted various sociological changes, whose results contribute to the mental instability of people like Adam Lanza.  Traditionally, gender roles use to be very distinct and clear.  In the mid 20^th century, you were considered less than a real man if you weren’t productive and independent.  You were expected to be a protector of women and children, even to your own detriment.  But in universities around this nation gender distinctions and traditional roles have been made into oppressive social constructs.  Gradually, these flawed revisions of conduct seeped into modern thinking and are now ingrained in the public consciousness.  In our feminized society the notion of being a real man is something akin to wife beating.  It’s clear that Lanza was coddled and emasculated, keeping him far from reaching maturity and, therefore, manhood.  So, like Lanza’s mother, we continue to roll out a slew of hot-tempered boys that fail to grasp the idea that attacking defenseless children is beneath a real man.  Nor, does society even endorse the pursuit of fulfilling such traditional roles any longer because they’re met with a flurry of leftist slanders like oppressor, patriarch, and chauvinist.                         

Lanza’s family life also shows the brokenness of applied modern, leftist thinking.  His parents had divorced and his father hadn’t been around in 6-months, or so.  To this end, the Left has worked tirelessly to marginalize the importance of the traditional family structure, the nuclear family format that is the basis for every civilization that’s ever existed.  Conversely, there’s been a push to glorify or normalize any alternative in the name of inclusion.  But what happens when kids don’t get the proper influences needed to become well-adjusted members of society?  Certainly, not all of them act out violently, but many do and, like this man, to fatal ends.  If there was more of a stigma attached to infidelity and divorce like there used to be, Lanza may have had the proper rearing and never gone on his armed temper tantrum.

Anti-traditionalism has cost the American experiment dearly, to the point that it’s nearly unrecognizable.  With our, almost inexplicable, obsession to embrace any contrary notion that infects our educational system or popular culture, we’ve watered down and ultimately rejected the things that made America work truly well.  Conventional family structures, traditional gender roles, limited government, individual responsibility, and a moral basis that’s driven by something higher than the failings of men are ideas that have been largely washed away by the tide of modernity--and in towns like Newton, the most innocent among us have paid the price.

Those trying to make sense of the Newton shooting by proposing a gun ban or some feckless dialogue on psychology or giving cause to an increased police state are, I fear, missing the point.  I think Marsha Lanza, the shooter’s aunt, puts it rather well, “It’s the person that does the killing, not the gun.”  And, “I thank God everyday my kids have faith, my kids know right from wrong…You’ve got to give your kids roots.”  The atheists and leftists may have tried to sever our roots to traditional understanding but that grants increased cause for the rational to rekindle the methods that have worked so well in America.  Alas, it’s not about gun control, but, rest assured, it is about self-control.