Just Why?

This past weekend we had a tragic shooting (is there a non-tragic shooting?) in Oak Creek, WI. Six defenseless Indian Sikhs were killed in their house of worship (Temple). As it turns out it was a white supremacist, ex-Army guy that did the killing. He was eventually gunned down as well, in what turns out was a bit of sweet justice.

This comes only a couple of weeks after the Aurora, Colorado Batman shootings where twelve innocents were killed in a gruesome killing spree by another maniac, James Holmes.

My questions are many.

When will the insanity stop? What possesses these men to get to the point where killing innocent, defenseless people can be done with calculated precision and zero emotion. What will it take to restore common decency to our culture? Why are semi-automatic weapons laws so weak? Where is God in all of this?

Short of draconian gun laws and national adoption of the death penalty, I see no answers to how we solve the problem. Even with those two pieces in place, bad people will continue to find ways to kill.

We didn't watch a single minute of news coverage of this tragic event as a family. I wear this claim with pride. We relied strictly on internet updates and newspaper coverage.

I do this intentionally.

Part of the reason is I want to shelter my kids from the endless media hype around tragic events like this. I attribute the news media with being a big part of the whole problem. News hype begets more nut-jobs trying to get news coverage. Things like this are traumatic enough for adults, I refuse to inflict the endless 24/7 news anchor talking heads on my kids. It puts them in a state of fear and despair. It puts me in one just reading about it. I've been through enough disasters with my kids to know that the news only puts them in a heightened state of fear and confusion. This includes Katrina, 911, Columbine, etc.

So I continue to take a partial head-in-the-sand approach to these kinds of things. I'm brutally aware that they are going on, and they will continue to go on as long as guns are made and hatred is spewed by extremist groups. That doesn't make me want to watch wall to wall coverage of it. It only makes me want to crawl in a hole and pray for this messed up world.

Blogging off...

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