My heart is breaking over another tragic shooting. My prayers are with all the families experiencing unimaginable grief. There are no words to alieve their pain. The first Christian act is to love (in action). The second is to pray. The third is to forgive. Christians can understandably get stuck on any one of those steps.
How long, LORD, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not save? Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds. Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted” (Habbakuk 1:2-3)
The Christian Response
As Christians, we are called to pray and forgive. Yes. But also to love, and to love with our actions, not just words.
John, the beloved disciple of Jesus, clarified what it looks like to have true Christian love for others. He wrote, “If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?” (1 John 3:17). In other words, if you have solutions to someone’s pain and you don’t share that solution – you don’t work towards solving their struggle – then, how can you say that the love of God is in you? Love is a verb.
Now, many people will quickly move to the anger stage of grief. This is natural – and in some ways necessary. Jesus got angry at injustice. So should we. And there are few things more unjust than the taking of young, innocent lives. Let’s get angry. But let’s not stay angry. Anger should turn to sober and firm resolve to work towards constructive solutions. This is what John calls love.
When it comes to gun massacres, the United States is tragically exceptional: There are more public mass shootings in the United States than in any other country in the world, according to a study published recently. The United States has 5% of the world’s population, and it had 31% of all public mass shootings. 1
The violence we are experiencing as a nation is a fairly recent and complex phenomenon. There are multiple contributing factors. Here are a few to consider:
8 Contributing Factors To Consider
1. Guns
There should be little doubt that we need to take a sober assessment of our current gun laws. Large majorities of Americans support universal background checks, permit requirements for gun ownership and bans on the most dangerous kinds of weapons and ammunition. Tighter gun control will not solve the problem, but it can’t hurt.
2. Mental Health
Many of the shooters in the U.S. mass shootings were mentally ill, according to the data. But other studies have shown that the estimated number of cases of mental illness hasn’t gone up significantly while the number of mass shootings in the U.S. has skyrocketed. 2 Every health professional I have spoken with admits that we do a terrible job in our country with mental health, and especially adult mental health.
3. Media Violence
The desensitization to violence created in video games, television, and the Hollywood screen has had a devastating impact on generations of Americans. Mental illness has not gone up significantly, but television and movie violence has. A Desensitization to violence combined with mental illness is obviously a dangerous combination that has exacerbated the problem.
4. Drugs
The proliferation of drugs and growing acceptance of their usage in our youth culture has created a Pandora’s box of collateral damage. Mix drugs with mental illness, hours and hours of isolation escaping into a violent world created by a video game, and easy access to the most powerful guns on the market – and it starts to explain a lot.
5. Fractured Families
The breakdown of the family has multiple consequences. It could be one small part of the problem. And this does not necessarily mean divorce. It has more to do with how the family is functioning, irrespective of the make-up of the family. There are families with two parents that are extremely dysfunctional, and families hit by divorce that are amazingly healthy. The family once acted as a moral-ethical foundation for the young. A system of parental rules and punishments, the disdain of all adolescents, has a way of creating proper boundaries and safe-guards against destructive behavior.
6. Loss of a Moral Compass
The mass exodus from the church and other faith communities (which have historically provided some kind of moral foundation) combined with a growing moral relativism creates a society with few moral underpinnings or core values that might give someone pause before pulling a trigger.
7. Gross Materialism
Much of the anger and boiling resentment that causes school shootings is at least partially a product of alienation, bullying, or paranoid-delusional thinking. Some of this could be linked to a purely material worldview.
8. A National Rhetoric of Violence
The way we talk to each other is increasingly violent and offensive. The words used by our local and national leaders matter. A polarizing, demeaning, and dehumanizing national rhetoric gives every person permission to summarily dismiss others and treat them as non-entities.
We have had 18 incidents with guns in American schools so far in 2018 (and its only February). I’m not saying that all of these factors are a part of every mass shooting. Certainly, they’re not. But each one seems to be contributing, in a general way, to a growing cancer.
It seems to me, that the Christian response of love means that we put our political persuasions aside and address the contributing factors (whatever they are). I’m tired of feeling this sickness. Our children are too important.
