4am

Yesterday once agin we saw an unspeakable tragedy in Connecticut. It’s still too early to tell exactly what happened but one thing is for sure, this is all we’ll see on tv for some time to come. Here at our house we talked about it as they did at school before the kids even made it home. We tried our best to put it into perspective and explain that these things do happen in the World but that while you need to be aware of your surroundings, you can’t live in fear.

They say the shooter had a personality disorder, duh, and first shot his Mom and then went to the school where she was a substitute teacher where he then cut down innocent lives before killing himself. Of course the anti-gun people will blame the guns, that were bought and registered legally by his mother, others will blame society for creating a culture of violence we can’t get away from (movies, tv, video games and how we glorify violence in general) and others will blame mental illness. Personally I believe the main issue is one of mental illness.

Let’s first look at guns and mark my words, the government and others will be coming for them in one form or another. They will try to outlaw certain types of guns or magazines or something but they will try to exploit this to their advantage. How do we know guns are not the problem? Well let’s look at Switzerland or Israel where gun ownership is much much higher yet violent crimes are much lower. If someone wants to injure or kill people, not having a gun won’t stop them.  You see they, as a country and a culture do not glorify violence or ignore mental illness like we do. A 36 year old guy in China attacked 22 kids and 1 adult at a school there yesterday with a knife. No word yet on how many died but you get the point. Should we outlaw alcohol as it causes thousands of drunk driving deaths each year or how about the cars themselves? Now as a responsible gun owner, I’m not against things like required training or a longer waiting period to buy a gun, or a law requiring them to be locked up in a safe when not in use but I’m not sure anything would have helped here. This guy was clearly deranged and sick as we’re now finding out.

Second is society, why do we sell and push violence here in our country. Has anyone seen a movie lately? Most of the top sellers are action packed violent shoot em up features that have good guys and bad guys like Mission Impossible and Batman. Even the shows on tv these days are way out of line. How about the news? We’re so connected as a society that everything bad is instantly in our face. We can’t get away from it. Hollywood makes these things and will continue to as long as it sells. We’ll continue to see it non stop until we turn off the tv and stop patronizing these violent shows.

Last is mental illness. We’re now so politically correct and self absorbed that we won’t say anything or try to help someone who any of us can see, clearly needs help if it’s not in our close little circle. We drive down the street and ignore homeless people, the vast majority of who have emotional or personality disorders and who need help. As long as it doesn’t touch us personally, we just drive on by or ignore it, you do, I do, we all do. On top of this our society is falling apart and many feel hopeless and helpless and when they get to the point where they have nothing to lose, the sick and deranged people can and will do these kind of things. We need to reach out and help these people, there had to be some warning signs that were just ignored. One of his classmates said “I’m not surprised” and knew some of these warning signs, yet didn’t speak up. His neighbors said “he was not well” and he was autistic. The shooter was also supposed to be taking certain medication that he apparently stopped taking.

So, my point is that a new gun law or eliminating violent movies isn’t going to stop these type of things from happening. Will it help, sure, but all three things need to be addressed. So as a society we need to all begin to care for everyone and stop throwing people away who have some sort of problem. We also need to speak up when we see something. You can bet your life it’ll come out in the next few days that someone saw something and will say “I wish I said something”. Many of ours and the kids friends parents called yesterday wanting to know who I could direct them to to get a concealed weapons permit. The gun stores were packed with record sales as people are scared. This always happens when these things happen.

Now to our home, the youngest was scared and had a hard time going to sleep. A classmate of the oldest guys left school crying and between us, he seems like he has a little personality issue himself. After we talked about it, we put on Christmas shows and tried not to have any news channel on.

I was in Boulder twice yesterday finally arriving home at 7:30 after a tasting at Whole Foods. Today we’re having a family birthday party for the oldest after doing some shopping in the morning. We’ll try as best we can to block out the tragedy and move on but will address it again as a family in the coming days. As I told the youngest, you need to be prepared but you can’t live in fear. Now we just need the news to let it go and let everyone heal. Then after things settle down, we can address things that’ll help. I fear that politics will win out though and little will be done as like I said before, passing a new law on guns or limiting violent movies isn’t going to fix it. There is no panacea.

In times like these, we need to lean on God. That’s all you can do, pray for understanding, pray for the victims and their family’s and pray for all of us as a people. God Bless.