As often occurs after a mass
murder, statements about God, guns, and mental illness have abounded in the
media and in society since last Friday’s shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary
School in Newtown, Connecticut.
Where
was God on Friday morning in Newtown, Connecticut?
Right where He’s always
been—comforting, loving, and grieving with us and for us. That never will
change.
So
how could a loving God allow twenty kindergarteners to be killed?
The theological answer is that we
live in a fallen world with all its human frailties, sin, and the consequences of sin. Good people die tragically and sometimes this includes children. Evil will be
present until Jesus returns.
But to explore the issue of God’s
presence in this tragedy further, we have to also look at ourselves. In this
increasingly secular progressive society we live in, certain forces have tried
to push God out of every arena. And these same forces are alive within the
church to water down sin and its consequences. I watched a particular thread about
hell unfold on Facebook one day, and a “professing” Christian made the comment,
“My God’s not cruel. Sorry yours is.”
Wow! It’s called justice. Read
your Bible.
Or as C.S. Lewis put it:
There are only
two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be
done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "THY will be
done." All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice there
could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever
miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.
And in a society where a large
percentage of people claim belief in God, many fail to have any Biblical basis
for what this means. How else can you explain the same people failing to
understand that they were made in God’s image, not vice versa? God shouldn’t be
different things to different people. He’s the One True God, consistent in His
actions since day one. Read the Bible, and you’ll find this is so.
God has been pushed out of the
school system. While they strive to teach right and wrong (and I don’t know how
you do this apart from calling sin what it is), they aren’t allowed to teach eternal
consequences, only the mentality of “if you get caught, X will happen.” It’s
not a far stretch to see that a gunman’s plan of taking down as many people as
he can in the most horrific manner he can before ending his life reflects no
thought of possible judgment before God. The killer has accomplished his goal of ensuring
his name goes down in history. He gets all the glory, right?
Wrong.
I think of all the commentaries I’ve
heard over the past few days, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee put it
best:
“We ask why there’s violence in our schools, but we have systematically
removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would
become a place of carnage? Because we’ve made it a place where we don’t want to
talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability. That
we’re not just going to have to be accountable to the police if they catch us,
but one day we stand before a holy God in judgment. If we don’t believe that,
then we don’t fear that. Maybe we ought
to let (God) in on the front end and we wouldn’t have to call him to show up
when it’s all said and done at the back end.”
There’s more to the story. Our
kids are inundated with movies that depict gratuitous violence and video games
where people are killed with no feeling or consequences. This is a generation who
has grown up on movies like John Q, where
threatening others to serve your own agenda produces happy endings. And we dare
ask why mass shootings happen?
American society continues to
push God out. You only have to look at Christmas to see this is so. The secular
progressives want to strip Christmas of any spirituality. They have a lot of
nerve celebrating Jesus’ birthday to begin with, but then they want to tell everybody
else to toss Jesus out the window, too.
Redefine Him, marginalize Him, and
castigate Him. Then ask where He is.
Yeah, that’ll work.
We are failing as a nation. Those
who point the finger at God and ask why He allowed this to happen are
hopelessly misguided. He set up the perfect world and gave us free choice.
We’re the ones who’ve screwed it up. This world has grieved God’s heart from
the moment He had to put us out of the Garden of Eden. God’s heart breaks every
time human carnage happens on this earth. The Bible states He is a patient God
(2 Peter 3:9), not wanting anyone to be lost, but this patience has an ending.
It’s called Judgment Day.
If you want to point a finger, it
must turn inward on society and not above to our Lord. And you can’t
simultaneously hold the belief there is no God and then blame Him when tragedy
happens.
Another
issue exists—mental illness.
While some shootings occur as a
result of a disgruntled individual, like the shooting at Birmingham, AL, St.
Vincent’s Hospital on Friday, mass murderers are more complex. Aside from what
I’ve discussed above, these individuals are often deeply disturbed and
suffering from some form of mental illness. In an article written by Liza Long,
she shares her fear about the mental illness her teenage son has. (I’ve
purposely not given the title of the article since it includes the Newtown
killer’s name.)
What struck me about Ms. Long’s
nightmare is her unwillingness to excuse her son’s behavior. Even when her own
life is endangered, she maintains an unwavering belief that he be held
accountable for his actions.
Furthermore, within the complex
discussion about mental illness is the reality that a diagnosis is not a
definitive precursor to mass killings. When my mentally ill sister would become
delusional, psychotic, or severely depressed, she hurt herself. Some mass
murders don’t show outward signs of mental illness beforehand. Sure, after the
fact, family and friends have 20/20 hindsight that provides some clues to an
illness. But a precursor to killing? Not always.
I remember during the early 1990s
living in Gainesville, FL, when a serial killer struck and butchered six
students. The first arrest made in the case was a mentally ill young man who
had stopped taking his psychotropic medication. When he was led into court in
shackles, the cameras captured his dazed, deranged look. He fit the profile of
the killer in everybody’s mind. Fortunately, DNA exonerated this innocent man.
Our mental health system is
broken, and this has to be part of the discussion. But we must tread cautiously
in doing so.
Then
there’s the elephant in the room. Gun control.
On Friday, while this carnage
happened in our country, China experienced a similar attack. However, the
perpetrator used a knife. Twenty-two school children were critically wounded by
the time he was stopped. Obviously, while tightening gun laws may reduce the
overall number of fatalities, it isn’t going to stop mass murders from
happening.
So what’s the answer to the gun
debate?
The Sandy Hook school principal
lunged at the attacker, but what weapon did she have to stop the killer or
protect herself? Her bare hands. That’s sad.
I heard the president of the
American Federation of Teachers speak on the television Sunday. The gist of her
remarks (expressed in her best kumbaya voice) was school is a safe sanctuary of
learning. Allowing more guns in (by administrators arming themselves) would
jeopardize this.
Really?
We have armed resource officers
in many schools in the South. Perhaps other regions of the country have them,
as well. A couple of years ago, an armed student from another school managed to
get inside the high school my son attends. The school went on lockdown while
the resource officer went after the intruder. When the student saw the officer,
he fled. The officer chased and captured him. The officer didn’t have to shoot
him, but the kid knew he would. The student was there to settle a score over a
girl, not to commit a mass murder, but imagine if he’d encountered the unarmed
female principal instead of the armed resource officer. You have to wonder if
the outcome would have been different.
In addition to having a resource
officer armed with a gun and taser, my son’s high school has two security
officers on constant patrol, security cameras whose feed goes directly into the
county sheriff’s office, and many other security measures in place. Will this
ensure complete safety for my child? No, but consider this. The gunman at Sandy
Hook only stopped killing when the first responders were running down the hall
toward the classroom he was in. At that point he took his life
The problem of mass murders and
public shootings is complex, one that has developed over time. The solution is
no doubt multi-faceted, but we can’t afford to take the same amount of time to
find it. Nor can it be the single-minded “my way or no way” mentality
permeating our society. If we don’t put aside the divisiveness in this country
and work together to find solutions, these murders will continue to escalate.
© Laura Hodges Poole
