It's amazing how quickly we forget. In my last post about the Newtown, Connecticut massacre, I promised a few more articles. I had a lot to write back then — a lot of angles and ideas about evil and society and gun control and culture. There seemed to be too much to write; too many thoughts too deeply disturbing to sort them all out in one or two blog posts. We probably all felt that way. I would stand in the shower (read: writer's refuge) and bullet point the issues.
Now I've forgotten them.
But here are the last two things that stand out about those musings.
First, I wonder if America has just proven that we're no longer mature enough for guns, like a child given a new responsibility for which he isn't ready, except that rather than growing up, we seem to be pooling down, regressing to the lowest, basest, most animalistic forms. It seems pretty clear that our nation is regressing in terms of good behavior. Remember, the trigger for these ideas was a mass murder of children. We certainly aren't advancing virtue. And as important as the Second Amendment has been in the founding and flourishing of our democracy, I wonder now if we're regressing to the point where we can no longer handle either privilege. Charles Colson, who understood both government and human nature, used to say that people must be controlled, either by self or by force. If we're losing our capacity for self-control, then we are necessarily abdicating that control to government. As our second president famously said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Again, I'm not opening the gun control debate here. I'm not proposing any new restrictions on guns. I am pointing out that gun ownership is as much as privilege as a right and that the best argument for removing that privilege is the one no one is making: namely that we can't handle our guns. We seem to believe that responsible and well-trained individuals can be trusted with firearms (police, military, hunters) but that those are exceptions, and gun ownership is an entirely individual status. That brings me to my second point.
Whether or not we're responsible enough to own guns, we are inexorably responsible for one another. The massacre in Newton wasn't just a failure on the part of Adam Lanza's parents, Adam Lanza's teachers, gun dealers in Adam Lanza's community, or the system of mental health screeners available to Adam Lanza. Violent death of children in our society represents a failure of our entire society. Certainly only Adam Lanza is ultimately responsible. Only Adam Lanza pulled the trigger. Only Adam Lanza could have stopped it before it started. No one else will face criminal charges in this case, and no one else should. But Adam Lanza is not an island unto himself, and while some in his family and community certainly had more access and opportunity to positively influence his troubled mind, all of us have some level of access and opportunity to do the same. We are each responsible for the influence we have on our society. And just as we all feel some level of emotional wound from the Newtown injustice, we should also feel some level of responsibility. Together, we have built a society in which children are gunned down in cold blood. The lesson of the first homicide rings out unheeded through thousands of years of human history: we are indeed our brother's keepers.
To the extent that Adam Lanza didn't feel that he was hurting himself when he hurt those children, to the extent that we don't feel we are hurting ourselves when we allow violence to shade the minds of our youth, we have lost touch with what it means to be human.
These problems — radical individualism, lack of empathy, violence, moral ambiguity, contempt for life, relative truth — these are deep, personal and profound issues. These aren't issues we can understand quickly or overcome easily. These are prehistoric and primary concerns that we must approach with humility, concern, and resolve. We're in a deep hole. Let's not forget that because we're distracted by a new episode of Breaking Bad.
