A long time ago I used this space to talk about gun control, and it was one of the most responded to pieces I have had the pleasure of writing for this newspaper. At the time I focused on the rights and wrongs of blaming the weapons themselves for the horrors of modern day mass shootings and acts of murder, siding with those that respect our nation’s founding document and our rights to bear arms.
This time, although I touched on it before, I want to focus on the perpetrators of the horrendous crimes and the way the modern media almost makes them into heroes for those with similar ideas in mind.
Last month, in Oregon, nine people were shot and killed and many more injured by a lone gunman who appears to have been socially isolated and cut off from the rest of the world. This is nothing new; I was one of those kids in my youth; it happens; not every kid nor teen can be the life of the party and some of us draw the short straw early in childhood socially.
However, while I might have wished to be able to escape my situation and the bullies that prey on such children, never once did thoughts of murder or blood shed cross my mind, even though I lived in a household that did indeed have guns.
Which is why I am writing this.
How can we blame an object when the much more dangerous thing are the minds of the people that have access to such objects? Has the world really gone so far into decay of moral fiber that the youth of today will kill with a smile before sorting themselves out?
But then we want someone to blame.
Should we target the massive news machine that pumps these images to us live as it happens, the magazine covers that make these despicable human beings like gods to their social peers?
Partially yes, because they do indeed almost seem to glorify the acts just by the constant attention given to them, then fruitlessly debate solutions to the problem at hand.
However, the real culprit is in our homes, our schools and in our souls.
When parenting has taken a backseat to mood altering drugs for children, producing psychological labels that ostracize almost as much as the ignorance they receive from their peers and our society in most regions of this country have degraded into the idea that only they matter; no more looking out for their neighbor or their fellow Americans, we only have our collective selves to blame.
In the 1980’s Stephen King started publishing novels under the name Richard Bachman, mostly old manuscripts that never saw the light of day or were rejected by publishers. The act was a stroke of genius by a writer I really admired because he did it to see how many books would sell without having the name ‘Stephen King’ on the cover.
The first of these was entitled Rage, about a teen boy who takes an entire high school class hostage and although he only kills one person, the teacher of that same class (and in fairness, something he shows remorse and pity for in the book itself), the book is almost a foretelling of the times that were to come.
King removed the book from his catalog and store shelves after several ‘shooters’ were found to have read or further identified themselves with the novel. Although I respect the author’s choice to control the publication of his own body of work and also the emotions he must have felt knowing his fantasy could have inspired such crimes, I think at that point we really were missing the point of the novel.
The shooters identified with the novel because they too felt as the protagonist, Charlie Decker felt. They felt left out and abandoned in a sea of people, too scared to see how brief of a time young adulthood is and for most of the individuals in these cases, had very thin to very abusive family structures to lean on.
Rage, from the title to the plot, reflected what they were feeling internally.
Now, that is NOT an excuse for the acts these young men have committed; murder is murder, and in my mind mass murder deserves the murder of the perpetrator if he survives. But when we look beneath the surface, a revelation of exactly why these young people were so angry, so lost and so disillusioned by the modern world around them that they turned to acts so horrendous and dire comes to light.
So, when yet another mad man goes on a rampage and starts to hurt, let’s not blame guns; let’s not blame movies or video games; let’s not blame music or television. Let’s place the blame directly at the feet of those responsible, which is every one of us when we turn our backs on others, and the parents of said children who should have been more invested in the miracle of life they created.
The old saying goes: “Guns do not kill people, people kill people,” but who killed those people from the inside before they picked up the gun?
Time to face up to the truth that most of the country has such a poor opinion of what matters and has lost sight of what is truly important in life…life itself.
