Vice President Kamala Harris has called for gun control laws to be enacted after a school shooting in Georgia left 4 dead and many injured. Republican Vice President nominee J. D. Vance called for more police on school grounds.
Information about the alleged shooter was quickly unearthed. The 14 year-old had a troubled family life and abusive parents. He was bullied at school, and it seems – as is often the case with disaffected children – there was some LGBTQ confusion in the mix. Despite warnings from the F.B.I. and plenty of signs the child was troubled, the boy’s father bought him a firearm last Christmas. The father now “faces charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for letting his son possess a weapon”.
The young man is in police custody.
The media did its best to misunderstand J.D. Vance, who lamented that mass shootings were currently a “fact of life”. Corporate media painted him as “tone deaf”, and repeated the line at every opportunity to portray Republicans as unwilling to protect children. Vice President Harris reacted, posting that it “doesn’t have to be this way” and lambasted the G.O.P for not passing more gun control legislation.
Also last week, the Tennessee Star released more leaked pages from Nashville shooter Audrey Hale’s diary. While the FBI seems to have been happy to leave the public in the dark, local police and independent media have taken risks to get more information out. The Bureau hasn’t given a compelling reason for keeping things under wraps in this case, and in some ways there isn’t a lot more to know beyond what we’ve already guessed: “Like a fish in polluted waters, Hale swam in an ocean of cultural lies about her identity, about race, about sexuality, and about Christianity. She was just one among millions brainwashed by a radical ideology that has overtaken countless American institutions and three-letter agencies. Perhaps that’s the real reason the FBI is so intent on covering up her motives.”
There is a clear ideological split over firearms in this country and it’s not plain whether that can be breached. Though an average weekend in Baltimore or Chicago sees many lives snuffed out, gang violence and ghetto retribution seem to be background noise until even more senseless loss of life animates fresh bickering over who bears more culpability.
I’m not saying that it isn’t a natural reaction to such a tragedy, to want to prevent more from happening. But it is easier for politicians to run on their respective firearm policies than to go deeper and find out what drives a young man to shoot anyone down, let alone in a cold-blooded plan. I will cut them some slack; in truth, society-deep problems are caused by the curse of sin. Where do you begin to address the loss of fathers or lack of purpose and what it does to fragile minds? Or to determine the effect of social media or the role of anti-depressants or ideologies which slowly chip away at contentment and self-control? It is good for lawmakers to seek to make good laws to help protect human life. But more than that, it is good for Christians to lift hands in prayer to God, that he would send healing to our nation – its fathers, its churches and families.