Violence in America

It’s Moonday once again. The past week was full of tragedies all around us.  We have adults killing children, children killing children; adults killing each other; humans killing humans all over the world.

Love ones passing away due to illness or aging. Disease and suffering inside many homes. Mass killing of children has raised the bar to new heights of insanity and shocks our hearts and numbs our consciousness. The sorrow and pain those families have to go through will last the rest of their lives.

A culture of killing is not new in America. For generations we have accepted the programs our children are fed in the media that has violent overtones and gratuitous violence in general as the norm. My generation grew up with television and the afternoon shootouts between cowboys and Indians was drilled into our young minds. Whether it was “Have Gun Will Travel,” “The Lone Ranger,” “The Rifleman,” “Wagon Train,” “Shane,” our little minds were being program to except violence as value in our society. The later programs, such as “Roy Rodgers,” “Hop along Cassidy,” “Gene Autry,” “Little House on the Prairie,” “Ponderosa,” and “Matlock,” tone down some of the gun violence, even introduce singing cowboys, the gun and shootouts was still a central theme. I am always astonished when lives are taken in our country by the use of a gun and you here people reacting as if this is something new in America. There is a serious disconnect to the reality of our society and the fantasies that we are hit with every day in our commercial media. Most Americans cannot handle the truth!

America is a gun based culture and that’s nothing new. The U.S. Constitution clearly provides for the right of every America to legally own a gun. That may include rifles, handguns, target pistols, and military style weapons that have awesome fire power. Machine guns and automatic weapons have muddled the waters, though the Supreme Court has held that some of these types of weapons can be outlawed by the States, the illegal possessions of a gun or high power automatic weapons are very much a part of our culture and it’s very difficult to do anything about them.

The major problem facing America is the possession of or the ability to gain access to guns by people suffering from mental illness.  This problem is almost impossible to prevent because of a legal presumption in our country that every person is mentally competent until they demonstrate behavior that clearly shows they are incompetent. Every gun dealer operates under this presumption.

Parents who have guns in the home and children are present have a legal duty to control those guns and what access can be gain by the children, including teenagers and young adults.  As a parent it can be extremely difficult if not impossible to know whether or not your child is a potential threat to themselves or to society in general unless that child is openly demonstrating hostile behavior toward the parent or someone else. It’s twice as difficult for a working single parent to foresee what a child maybe planning to do in the future.

The sorrow and the suffering faced by the families in every shooting incident in America can’t be put into words. These tragedies can destroy your soul and cripple you the rest of your life. Know that violence is the mother’s milk in our national character and banning guns is not going to stop that fact. Freedom comes with a price and when we are not willing to pay that price by taking steps to counteract the language and culture of violence, and that any means necessary always includes violence to solve problems we see in our media, there is no end in sight with the loss of innocent lives in America.

We have the largest prison population in the world and we are the largest manufacture of guns and other lethal weapons in the world. We can’t turn our back on these facts when considering the controlling of guns and violent uses of guns in America. We must come to terms with the reality of our situation and come up with creative solutions to one of the downsides of freedom; some people can’t handle freedom and need help!

May the families who are suffering from this latest act if senseless violence finds peace and know that thinking and compassionate Americans have you in their hearts and prayers.

Peace.