Rosenburg. Charleston, Isla Vista,. Ft. Hood, Washington, D.C. Santa Monica, Newton, Brookfield, Minneapolis, Oak Creek, Aurora, each city is where a mass shooting occurred over the past three years. In total, they have accounted for close to 100 innocent deaths. Analysts continue to argue there’s not an increasing trend to this mass violence, yet it seems like every time I look at the front page of USA Today, an outbreak of one has taken place again.
Just last week at North Arizona University in fact, another person was dead and three injured because of one of these shooting rampages.
And when each of these rampages take place, it only leads people to argue for greater gun control, while the opposing forces argue back for the continued right to bear arms and protect themselves. But nothing ever seems to get accomplished in that debate.
So what’s the solution then?
Sadly, I’m not sure if I have that answer. But what I do know is that America is glorifying violence more and more every single day. It’s in our movies. It’s in our television shows. It’s in our video games. It’s in our sports. It’s in our music. It’s everywhere. And I don’t see it going away anytime soon because people keep on gravitating towards it. In other words, the more violent something appears, the more it seems to bring in greater dollars.
And even worse, our newspapers and media continue to glorify it as well, pasting pictures of each mass killer all over the news and profiling their entire lives for days and weeks beyond every single tragedy. I often wonder if this only propels someone who’s a budding mass murder to actually go forward with their crime, especially when they feel they are a nobody and want to become a somebody.
Thus I feel the only solution I can safely come up with is to start eliminating the glorification of violence in everything. I know that’s a big undertaking, but to get there, it means each of us having to stop supporting it as well.
I’ve backed away tremendously these days from going to movies that are mega-violent because I never feel good after watching them. Occasionally, when I’ve gone against that principle and seen an Academy Award potential that had too much violence in it, I’ve left feeling charged up and full of anger.
Maybe that’s what happens to those that eventually become mass murderers? Maybe they have allowed themselves to plug into the violence in our culture over and over again, so much so that they have become de-sensitized to it and instead become charged up, angry people all the time, which is nothing more than just a ticking time bomb.
To be perfectly honest, I have no idea why anyone could ever pick up a bunch of guns and then kill a ton of innocent people. But arguing for gun control or the right to bear arms is just sticking us in a perpetual pattern of debate and really doing nothing about the problem. Maybe if we stop supporting the growth of violence in our country instead, maybe if we stop paying to see more of it, maybe if we stop glorifying it in the news, then things might begin to change.
The bottom line is that it comes down to each and every one of us. We each need to be the ones to make this change, not the government. This is why I don’t gravitate towards violent-anything these days and why I choose to support expressions of unconditional peace and love to all instead. I only hope that one day we all might be doing this, because until then, I’m afraid we’re only going to keep on having to endure many more innocent deaths of God’s children in these mass shootings, which is truly a tragedy indeed…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson