What’s Missing Here

I was saddened and in shock when I heard of the shooting in Connecticut yesterday.  Someone asked me what would cause someone to commit such a heinous crime.  This person said that there must be something missing in a person’s life that would cause them to do such a thing.  I thought this was a good question and it got me thinking.

Listening to the mainstream media, we might believe that the thing missing here is tougher gun legislation.  Ironically, another perpetrator slashed 22 children with a knife in China.  Would tougher gun legislation have stopped the tragedy in China?  Should we ban knives as well as guns?  In addition, Can't cars be used to murder people?  It looks like tougher gun legislation is not what is missing here. 

As I have had some time to think about this tragedy, I have concluded that two things are missing here.  Teachers and administrators lack the resources necessary to make students safe in our schools and classrooms.  We also need to broaden the education of our students to include more than the current traditional academic curriculum.

In order to insure the safety of our schools, we need security measures that include armed security.  It is alleged that in this case, the shooting started in the administrative office and then escalated to the classroom where the children were murdered.  Trained armed security would have been able to subdue the shooter before he got to the classroom thus minimizing casualties, especially the murder of children. 

We also need to include curriculum that educates students on the sanctity of life.  In 1962 we removed prayer and the Bible from our public schools.  In essence, we removed morality from school curriculum.  Since that time we have replaced the absence of morality with secular humanism and post modernistic philosophy.  These philosophies teach that there are no absolute truths so if you believe you have been wronged; you are free to do whatever you believe is necessary to correct the situation.  In the absence of a moral compass, this might include murdering anyone that is perceived to be the cause of how someone has been wronged. 

We still do not know the particulars of the situation so this is all conjecture at this point.  However, what the alleged shooter did are the actions of someone who is troubled and believed this was his only course of action to correct the situation.  We also can observe that the administration of the school was powerless to stop or prevent the tragedy and the shootings only stopped when the shooter was taken down. 

Everyday millions of parents send their kids off to school.  Fortunately, a vast majority of them attends class and get home without any incident.  However, we can do more to insure tragedies like the one in Connecticut do not occur again.  Let us not use this tragedy to advance some anti-gun political agenda and instead learn from it and correct what went wrong.  We owe it to our children.