Where were you last Friday when you learned of the recent tragedy where twenty tender, beautiful lives were snuffed out? I will never forget.
Where were you last Friday when you learned of the recent tragedy where twenty tender, beautiful lives were snuffed out? I will never forget.
I was six years old when President John F. Kennedy was shot, and I was eating Ritz crackers with my mother after school when the news came on about his death. Last Friday I was visiting with my daughters after Christmas shopping in Chicago. I will always remember the hole in my stomach as I watched the wailing parents of those tiny children. Please friends, pray for them. Even if you have never prayed before, start now.
Everyone in the U.S. asks, yet again, “Why does this type of tragedy happen?” Is it simply rank evil, the fault of underground or legal gun sellers? Could it be that drug use is rampant or perhaps that we in the medical community have done a poor job identifying and treating those with mental illness?
It may be all of these things, but I think that there is more going on here. I believe, that a shooting like we just witnessed in Newtown, occurs as a result of different elements coming together like a perfect storm.
If we review the profiles of the young men who have shot innocent folk in public over the past ten years, we can see at least one thing in common:
The perpetrators were young men who lived isolated, anti-social lives. Many spent a lot of time with media playing violent video games and strategized about ways to commit horror. We don’t know about their family lives, but we do know that they had access to assault weapons. But I’ll bet that if you or I could sit down with them and have coffee for an hour or two just before the killings, we would find that something was awry. We would discover that most felt like social outcasts, had serious anger issues and said things that made us feel uncomfortable. Most of us, I believe, if pressed could have detected that something in each of them was about to blow.
But if we could identify these men before a shooting spree, then what? We can’t medicate each one, put them in a mental health program or in a psychiatric institution. But I do believe there are some things that we can do.