Thoughts on Sandy Hook, and Christmas

  When we allow grief to set policy, it propagates more grief. I've seen blogs that point out that the failure in Sandy Hook was not in controlling the availability of weapons, but rather an unwillingness or inability for area residents to recognize what is right and wrong, then act on that recognition. Many people who knew the gunman reported that they were “not surprised” to learn he had committed this horror. He was widely reported as “odd” or “weird”, yet no one took the time to look further.

For fear of being labeled "insensitive" to the plight of mentally ill individuals, we allow them to occasionally take over our entire country through gross acts of violence. America used to have a backbone. We used to stand up to bullies, dictators, and madmen. Now we spend so much time comparing ourselves to them to make sure we're "not as bad as that guy", we have forgotten that bad guys do bad things, and that the reason we have been given the ability to see that is because we also have the responsibility to prevent it.

I am shattered by the image of those broken parents as I put myself in their shoes. I hug my school age sons a little tighter since last Friday, and I find myself urged to pray for the comfort of those left behind. What was done cannot be undone. It may be that what was done cannot be prevented.

At this time I am reminded of another madman. One who was so concerned with a perceived threat that he ordered the deaths of every male child under the age of two in an entire region. And he had the might of the sole superpower nation in the world behind him, to see that it happened.

Our Lord escaped that horror, and never once suggested that the means used to kill those babies be eliminated. He came to show that the deficiency is in the hearts of every one of us. He pointed out that we live in an evil age, surrounded by evil. He showed us that the way to overcome evil is through diligent prayer and love for one another. Love for one another implies that we protect one another. Since we are unable to remove from our world the means which bad people use to harm others, we can do only as Jesus did. We must be willing to put ourselves in harms way to prevent harm to others. Let us not cower even further by abandoning our responsibility to protect our children to the good intentions of others. Every parent of every child that died last week did that when they sent their children to school that day. A school that the gunman knew would be absolutely defenseless.