38superfan wrote:The cause of this type of tragedy is the darkness and coarseness that pervades our culture. Peggy Noonan has written about this decline on these pages and it needs to be addressed in this context once more. You can see the darkness in our movies, television, video games, music, online, clothing, tattoos, piercings and our books. Popular TV shows like 24 or The Walking Dead are not built from solid data sets that feed the better angels of our nature, but from the constant urge to push at a barrier that allegedly has no consequences. What our culture fills its mind up with has consequences.
When the children of America slip into a black t-shirt covered with skulls and settle down in front of a 96-inch TV to watch people shoot each other in glorious color and surround sound, do we think there will be no consequences? When our children, boys mostly, are left to enjoy hours of entertainment through a gory, post-apocalyptic, first-person shooter video game, what do we think we are doing to them? The Hunger Games? Please.
Our American culture is producing more cruelty and mass murder than ever before and it’s not because of the guns. I have been raised in the “gun culture” that is often tagged with blame for all gun violence and I’ve been shooting for over 40 years. The gun culture that worships at death’s door instead of the Church is not my gun culture. The gang members that shoot themselves daily are not my gun culture. These are symptoms of the rot that rises, as bile does, in the back of the throat of America. The rot is caused by an over stimulated, uneducated, irreligious, culture that is being brainwashed by the entertainment industry that the darkness of their products have no effect on our children. It’s easy to see if you see what is there.
The gun culture that I belong to is made up of good people, churchgoers, Kiwanis, Freemasons, Moose, Marines, teachers, accountants, country folk, city folk, and many more. We are the America that is seemingly slipping away and in over 40 years I’ve not known one murderer nor have I witnessed even one dangerous incident with a gun. Look hard at how we treat each other.
Look hard at what goes into our children’s brains. Garbage in equal’s garbage out. Drag your children to church and teach them about the sanctity of life. This loss of the sanctity for human life is a result of our addiction to entertainment and I fear that it’s the beginning of the end.
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You're dead on, 38superfan.
I, too grew up in a gun culture that instilled safety and responsibility above all else, tolerated absolutely NO breaches of those rules, and existed within the framework of family, church and community (as opposed to replacing all that, as appears to be the case with these mass murderers).
While reading your post it occurred to me that the gratuitous violence, gore and moral depravity that is now offered on primetime TV and the rest of pop culture (not to mention cable and these damned games all the kids are obsessed with) might have some disturbing parallels with the games and other dealings-out of death and gore that the powers that USED TO be used to placate the mobs after Rome resorted to bread and circuses to hold the empire together. What we’ve been talking about here, combined with entitlements, really seem to me to be the 21st-century version of the old Roman bread and circuses. And we know what happened to Roman civilization. I suppose there is no point in pondering whether it is a cause or a symptom; because either way we are probably way too far down the slippery slope to come back home.
"The Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference." -Thomas Jefferson
Gun-crazy? Me? I'd say the gun-crazy ones are the ones that don’t HAVE one.
"Not to worry, I got this !!! " "Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here." Captain John Parker
