Yesterday in Newtown, Connecticut, a twenty-year old
gunman, after killing his mother, went to a local elementary school where his
mother worked, and killed 26 people, 20 of whom were children between the ages
of 5 and 10. He subsequently shot
himself. The shooting was instant
national news and there has been an outpouring of sympathy towards the families
and a lot of discussion has followed about what to do to prevent these things
from happening in the future. Most of
the talk has to do with legislation: gun control laws in some cases and in
other cases even giving teachers means to protect their students. As a huge supporter of the freedom of speech,
none of this discussion is bad. However,
I believe we are barking up the wrong tree.
I talk a lot about the influence that culture has on
us as individuals. I want to go back to
that for a second. Earlier this week I
read an article about the AMC television show “The Walking Dead.” If you don’t know about the show, it is AMC’s
biggest hit and follows people trying to survive the zombie apocalypse. The
PTC criticized the “TV-14” rating of the show, citing its gory nature and use
of profanity to say it should be rated “TV-MA.”
I myself have watched the show a few times. Among the violent things the show depicts is
a man getting stabbed in the eye with a piece of glass and a man breaking off a
zombie’s arm and pulling a bone out of the arm.
Sounds quite grisly, doesn’t it?
In video games, the examples are even more direct. Grand Theft Auto, one of the most popular
video game franchises on the market, thrives on the player’s ability to kill
and steal in every scenario imaginable. In
the song “Little Piece of Heaven” by Avenged Sevenfold, a somewhat popular hard
rock band, the repetitive chorus says “Must have stabbed him fifty ******* times/I
can’t believe it/Ripped his heart out right before his eyes.” At the culmination of it all, we have the
latest teen fad, The Hunger Games, which revolves around the story of throwing
a bunch of teenagers into a “game” in which the goal is to slaughter everyone
else in the game with you and emerge the victor. And we wonder why tragic shootings happen in
our country.
The answer to this situation is not gun control,
security, or legislation. When a culture
removes God from among themselves, there is no moral standard left, which
inevitably gives way to violence. When a
culture embraces violence as a means of entertainment, it is only a matter of
time before that fantasy finds its way into reality. We have made it clear we don’t want God among
us. This might have been God granting
our wish. Now is the time to stop and
reflect: is this really what we want?
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