Guns. Once again they demand our attention. One guy uses them to kill randomly at yet another school. Another guy speaks of them yet again as the root cause of such tragedies. Before typing another word allow me to stipulate that I believe President Obama sincerely meant what he said. I disagree with him, but I could be wrong.
Surely all honest people would agree that guns have become one of the most powerful symbols in our nation. On the far right guns get wrapped up symbolically with baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet. They belong to our glorious heritage. To people on the far left guns stand for what they view as the cancerous qualities of the Marlboro Man: violence, machismo, isolationism, arrogance. I venture to say most of us fit someplace in between on this spectrum. But to me the whole conversation completely misses the point.
The point is that our culture has produced significant numbers of loners who are desensitized to violence and enraged by their obscurity. They have no hope. They believe their lives--crappy as they are--are the best to which they can ever aspire. Some are mentally ill. Others have substance abuse problems. Still others have been seduced by radical Islam.
The common thread running through all these men (no women yet) is despair.
If I have correctly diagnosed the root cause of random school shootings, the antidote must address that despair. But contemporary American culture has gotten dangerously close to bankruptcy on what it takes to ease despair. It takes faith. It takes faith in grace, mercy and forgiveness. It takes faith in God. Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th century Danish philosopher, wrote far more eloquently of this, especially in his work The Sickness Unto Death. I can offer only a shadow of his thinking. But shadows are where we are.
We need light to eradicate the shadow that has fallen over the souls of so many young men. We need the light of the love of Jesus. Without it no law, no speech, no nothing can prevent the next shooting.
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