Why are we killing each other?This is going to be the subject of my podcast a week from this coming Wednesday (April 15), because I think it's a valid question. More importantly, we're going to talk about your personal defense options on a daily basis.
Even in a media-saturated nation that encourages short memories, these numbers are conversation-stopping: Forty-seven people dead in the past month in American mass shootings and their aftermaths. It's to the point where on Saturday, dizzyingly, the mayor of Binghamton found himself offering Pittsburgh its sympathies.
Put aside for a moment the debate over guns. This isn't about policy. It's about asking the urgent question: What is happening in the American psyche that prevents people from defusing their own anguish and rage before they end the lives of others? Why are we killing each other?
This is not an era of good feeling in the United States. We have under our belt eight years of pernicious terrorism angst, six years of Iraq war weariness and, now, months of wondering how bad the American economy's going to get and when — or, worse, whether — it's going to come back. People are tense. There's less inclination to help out your fellow human being.
Meanwhile, anchors and analysts and witnesses and bloggers cast about in an information-age fog trying to make sense of something that is, in the worst way, nonsensical. They rush to offer solutions, but the thing they typically dodge is that we seem to be powerless to stop it all — that our community, our neighbors, may be next. That's too terrifying to contemplate, not to mention too open-ended for American news consumers reared on tidy Hollywood endings.
Author and host of the hit OUTDOOR CHANNEL show SHOOTING GALLERY spouts off...
Sunday, April 05, 2009
MSNBC on Mass Shootings
Worth reading (certainly a rarity!) from MSNBC:
Excellent comentary!
ReplyDeleteI attribute this problem and most others of our time to the decline of culture. People have been leaving religion for years, and morality and common decency have been eroding heavily for the last few decades. Look at how many people grow up in single parent homes. More and more people are emotionally damaged in one way or another. Sadly, some people are so mentally sick that they not only want to destroy themselves but take other people with them as well. I don't think these random shootings will stop anytime soon, so those of us who won't be victims must be ready.
ReplyDeleteRKL
Hello Michael and thank you for sharing information on these shootings. I believe our society in America is simmering to a slow boil. I have been on this earth 46 years now and can remember growing up with a known understanding that hurting others was wrong. To take out my frustrations and upset on others was leaving me open to more hurt. I believe in God and I believe there is a heaven and there is a hell. I believe that contemplating murder and carrying out that act is a sin and subject to God's authority. The type of judgment for that kind of act, according to the bible, is harsh to say the least.
ReplyDeleteIn my way of thinking and point of view our religions, media, school teachings have been turning us into sidewalk psychologists trying to figure out the motives of someone who just committed a crime and to not think badly of them and in turn not consider ourselves bad people for thinking badly of others. I believe the scripture of, "Judge not, lest you be judged", has been taken out of context for too long.
My bottom line is, our society has become conditioned to believe that what we feel is more important than anything else or anyone else. That there is nothing in this life or the next to fear because God is only a God of love, love like Pa on Little House on the Prairie loves his children. The basic inner voice that tells us we are about to commit a deadly and serious sin has been muffled by Oprah and other talk shows and media experts who explain away the actions of a killer and focus on their life tragedy instead of the victims.
Our society has lost its fear of God and of punishment from God, therefore, we have a society about to run a muck. I am glad that I still have and listen to my conscience, I pray for those who have stopped that they will hear God yelling before they take a life.
palmbay lou.
There are 300 million people in this country. The actions of a handful of spree killers says little that's reliable about society at large.
ReplyDelete"Our society has lost its fear of God and of punishment from God, therefore, we have a society about to run a muck. I am glad that I still have and listen to my conscience, I pray for those who have stopped that they will hear God yelling before they take a life."
ReplyDeleteLet's compare the number of spree killers to the number of women who killed their kids because God told them to.
Crazy is crazy. God has nothing to do with it.
All this psycobabble about these mass shootings being the result of the decay of family, removal of religion from our lives, government schools, violent movies and video games, etc etc. is a load of crap. (Psychology is BS any way.)
ReplyDeleteThose are not causes they are additional symptoms of the root problem.
STRESS.
Resulting from an unnatural lifestyle where to many people are crowded to tightly together, always in a rush to the next commitment.The decline of the "normal family is the result of both parents HAVING to work 40 + hours a week to pay for basic survival, the majority of divorces result from disputes over MONEY. Alcohol and drug use are at all time highs, because people want to escape the rat race, even if only for an hour or 2. Religious worship is at an all time low because the alternative to Church is more important, 1 morning that you do not HAVE to get up and BE somewhere, 1 morning that you can roll over and get that extra 30 minutes sleep.
I guarantee that you will see more and more of this sort of thing, mass killings, doomsday cults, drug overdoses, alcohol use, there will be an even greater demand for video games, movies, and other types of entertainment that let the average person temporarily escape their mind numbing schedules.
The only "cure" is the end of the materialistic,hard charging, 24/7 society we have trapped ourselves in. This does not necessarily mean planetary disaster, just drastic societal change. (although disaster is likely to be the only practical method of motivation).
When you eliminate the psychology BS it does not take a very smart person to observe either the stresses placed on people or the predictable end result. Look at Japanese society, prior to WWII the Japanese were calm sedate people to whom a craft took until it was done, since the post war industrialization boom they have one of the highest rates of alcoholism in the world, a suicide rate double the US, and they also (with out guns) have mass killings, look at Aum, the group responsible for the Tokyo poison gas attack.
To many monkeys in to small a cage will start going crazy, people are the same. If you try to lift 100 pounds with a 10 pound test line it will snap. If every one is in debt up to their eye balls and you start taking away jobs, after making their savings evaporate, they to will snap. Some will have heart attacks, some will go home and quietly kill themselves and some will go berserk and kill everyone in sight.
But hey, it's just one of those things, like pollution, it's progress. Aren't you proud.
Tom Bogan
(Who hasn't worked, snapped, or dropped in almost 3 months. )
And then in the midst of the violence:
ReplyDeleteAt least 8 states claim 10th Amendment state rights!
http://www.taxtruth4u.com/eight%20states.html
at with the last great depression there was a great increase of suicides and murders then as well.
ReplyDeleteEvil is real and limited.
ReplyDeleteEvil will make every attempt to overtake good, even up to the point of death. Good will always prevail...it's Easter week, that's always a powerful reminder that evil is ultimately limited, thus it shall not prevail.
"What are we barreling toward?
ReplyDelete"A difficult time, I think."
-- Peggy Noonan in Patriotic Grace, a neat little book that came out before the elections last fall.
I fear that a lot of the crazies are set off by depression due to economic factors. All I can say is that while I fully understand that not all of the deaths would have been prevented by a CHL holder in the room we can assume that the death toll would be lower.
ReplyDeleteI say this in the most polite way possible, if you are one of the MANY CHL holders who chooses not to carry on a daily basis because "its uncomfortable" or "I dont travel in those sorts of areas" please rethink your decision.
The media had floated a story that the economic downturn was the problem. Sorry, but I see a problem bigger than the economic meltdown causing this. I see the destruction of the nuclear family by first, divorce and now homosexual marriage. I see the most innocent, the unborn, as an inconvenience because of a momentary indiscretion or because the men are using women as pieces of meat to satisfy their desires.
ReplyDeleteI see boys growing up to be men who have never had a positive male role model in their life and have learned to be a man by watching television or playing video games in which you kill the one who insults you or wrongs you or you just want to make your mark.
I see a country that has taken a God who thinks every life is precious in His sight in which He does not want to see perish and replaced it with a view that we are all evolved from a pool of goop and that there is no god, that there is nothing but dirt and worms after this mortal life.
I see a populace who has learned that you can't fail and if you fail, it is the other person's fault. I see a country where if you do something stupid, you sue because you should not have been able to do the stupid stunt.
I see a society who has allowed their brains to grow to mush by indulging in mindless watching and indoctrination by the "know-nots" on television.
I see a society whose education system is showing children that to be successful in school, you memorize the essentials, regurgitate it on a test, forget about it and move on to the next. Critical thinking and analysis-what's that?
I see a society of parents who are more worried about paying for their Beemers and bigger homes while their children are left alone after school to fend for themselves and learn to grow up through MTV, VH1 and Disney.
I see a society who has become complacent on what a special country we have and how much blood has been shed to save the principles so divinely laid out on the pieces of parchments called the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
I see a society who allowed itself to be sold a bill of goods this past November, and voted a person into the most important job in the world because he could read a teleprompter well.
The economic meltdown is the least of our problems.
How is grumbling and whining going to help? Reminds me of those great lyrics by Luther Ingram and Mack Rice. My favorite lines:
ReplyDelete"If you're walking around thinking
That the world owes you something
'cause you're here.
"You're going out the world backward
Like you did when you first came here.
"Keep talking about the president
Won't stop air pollution;
Put your hand over your mouth
When you cough,
That'll help the solution."
Stress is fabricated not by society, but by the person experiencing it. Since the 70's people have had pleanty of names and excuses by which they can blame or claim as the cause for their feelings and actions. Just as with everything else in life, if we preached personal responsibility instead of relying on science, goverment, religion, or other we would see much less of this...
ReplyDeleteMarkie Marxist sez: "We Marxists have done a great job of mentally disarming the masses by preaching the values of pacifism and nonviolence. Turning everyone into nonviolent pacifists, like those airline passengers that sat out 9/11 and died as a result, or those thirty some students at VT who let themselves be killed by one man with a pistol, may make them act like good little Marxists, but it also helps our mass murderers kill them. That's why everyone should be a practicing pacifist, never carry a gun, and never ever resist our Marxist/warrior/hero/criminal/mass murderers when they're doing their work of increasing the national body count that drives our gun ban agenda."
ReplyDeleteMedia attention for active killers.
ReplyDeleteVictim disarmament zones.
PDs with obsolete "wait for SWAT" training.