Reflection on Gun Violence

During the earlier part of my life, I grew up under very poor circumstances. In elementary school, I spent time in Birmingham, Alabama in a 99% Black part of the city. The poverty-stricken black community was the majority with a small sprinkle of lower middles class. The schools were terrible, and streets were violent. However, this was our neighborhoods normal. This brings me to reflecting on the mass shootings in Uvalde.

Everyone wants to know, what would cause a young man to inflict such evil on children and families who had done them no harm? If we can understand why these things happen, maybe we can come up with a solution.

On the political left, the solution is consistently more gun control. But that makes one think, drugs are illegal, but fentanyl is currently killing at record rates. Prohibition created the mob and mob related crime. Making guns illegal will simply take guns from law abiding citizens, create gun cartels, and leave Americans unable to defend themselves.

On the right, there’s a mixed response. Some say put guns into the hands of those in the schools. Others want improved mental health services. The “why” however, is missing from these solutions. Why is this happening more frequently over the last decade? Why are the killers so young? Why is mental illness on the rise among young people and the general population?

Thinking of this took me back to when I was a little poor black boy in Alabama. I understood why then, and I understand why now. Humans cannot exist without hope, and when a person feels hopeless, they will destroy their lives and those of people around them. Young people tend to be emotionally immature, and they often show their pain by inflicting more pain. Unfortunately, “striking back” is how these young people are expressing their feelings of hopelessness.

Too many parents spend too little time with their young children. Too many adults refuse to admit that children need more than love and require much more emotional attention. Raising children that are emotionally mature requires guidance, structure, and most importantly a reason to believe in themselves and others.

All humans live by faith, whether the atheist or the person of God. No scientist sat in biology class and reproduced all the lab tests presented in their textbook. Each student cannot and did not verify the accuracy of what the text teaches. Instead, someone made a claim that they witnessed something happen and wrote it down. The person of God does the same thing. Someone made a claim that they witnessed something happen and wrote it down. The man of God has faith in that written account. This summarizes how faith is foundational to all human beings.

What happens when you fail to give young people something higher to believe in? You get a generation with nothing to hope for. When society robs a child of hope too early, we see a rapid increase of mental illness in our minors. The perpetrators of school shootings are these young people who have lost all hope. No law can protect a society that loses hope for a brighter future.