Declare War on Evil, Not Guns

Here are fascinating statistics about school shooting in America. Please be advised that guns have been a part of American culture since our creation. People have owned guns for a long time, that is nothing new. What is new and worth recognizing is the increase in the violence.

1700’s- 1 school shooting in 1764

1800’s- 28 school shootings over 100 years

1900- 1960’s- 96 school shootings

*Prayer removed from public schools in 1963

*Abortion Legalized in 1973

1970-2000-in 30 years, 159 school shootings

Total for the 20th Century- 226 school related shootings

2000-2018- 18years and counting-212 school shootings

Although the AR-15 was introduced to the Military in 1963, mass shootings involving it began around 2012 with the high profile Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting which killed 12 and injured 70 using Smith & Wesson's version of an AR-15. Also, the 2012 massacre of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut used a Bushmaster XM15 rifle, which is functionally similar to the AR-15.

_______________________________________________________________

I remember the first time I shot a gun; it scared the crap out of me. It was louder and more powerful than I imagined.

I had an instant awareness and respect for its power.

A gun is a powerful and potentially dangerous tool. So are opiate painkillers, and so is dynamite. We can use or abuse all of them.

When I hear about another mass shooting in our country, I get deeply upset, not just because of the lives that are taken, but because I know that these behaviors are a symptom of something much darker and more sinister occurring in our nation.

The media and politicians want us to believe we have a "gun control issue" but that's not the right diagnosis.

We have a problem with our choices.

On a cultural level, we choose apathy and evil by tolerating it on mass scales.

To quote St. Teresa of Calcutta, “The fruit of abortion is nuclear war.”

Please realize that people of love don't shoot other people. 

People who are connected don't abuse their prescribed medications, and people who are constructive don't blow things up.

However, we don't have a culture of love or life. We have a culture of death.

And it does what it is designed to do. It produces death.

And we continue to tolerate it.

Evil is what produces these events. Not the guns.

Guns are steel, lead, copper, and firing pins.

To quote Christ, "What goes into someone's mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them."

Because it comes from the heart.

What comes out of the heart of our culture is apathy and an acceptance of evil.

We get the culture we deserve.

If every form of behavior is acceptable, you always get disorder.

Taking lives of innocent people is not OK. Whether it is 3,000 unborn children a day (in America) or 17 young people and their teachers at a high school.

We continue to accept abortion, remove prayer from schools, want the government to be our moral compass, and our universal problem solving apathy under the guise of "acceptance" has produced a moral relativism which has deadened the conscience of the nation, medicine, and many parts of the church itself.

In a morally bankrupt society that has to put "do not eat" on the labels of Tide Pods, has an epidemic of teen suicide, and opiate addiction, maybe we need to start looking at our heart and what we actually value.

Our values influence every decision we make. 

?Do you value life?

Make better decisions.

Declare war on evil. 

Start at home. 

We have a lot of work to do.