Another school shooting
The 2006 school year is a mere month old, but the past week has witnessed no fewer than three fatal school shootings. The most recent was carried out not by a student, but by a local milkman, 32-year-old Charles Carl Roberts IV, who shot 11 girls in a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, PA, killing five. A sixth girl has been removed from life support and taken home to die. Roberts didn’t have the profile of a serial murderer and pedophile, but he had recently admitted to his wife to molesting two young relatives in previous years, and his suicide notes and actions in the schoolhouse indicated an intention to repeat such acts once again.
The anti-gun left has, of course, not missed this opportunity. Instead of blaming evil men for evil acts, they condemn the implements of their crime. Rosie O’Donnell, in one bizarre exchange, even went so far as to claim the Second Amendment of the Constitution is “not really a right.” If guns were the problem, the solution would be simple. Much to the contrary, that which threatens us is decidedly not a gun problem, but a cultural one.
We pray for the families of those lost in these tragedies and for the surviving victims—in this most recent case Amish schoolgirls lacking even a developed concept of social violence, much less a sense of its prevalence in our society. Perhaps there is something we “English” can learn from the Amish here: The value of whole families, raising children apart from a sexual- and violence-saturated media, seeing education as an extension of the home, rejecting our secularized society’s separation of faith and morality and forgiveness, to name but a few. Of note, one Nickel Mines Amish woman summed up the situation this way: “If you have Jesus in your heart and he has forgiven you... [how] can you not forgive other people?”
The 2006 school year is a mere month old, but the past week has witnessed no fewer than three fatal school shootings. The most recent was carried out not by a student, but by a local milkman, 32-year-old Charles Carl Roberts IV, who shot 11 girls in a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, PA, killing five. A sixth girl has been removed from life support and taken home to die. Roberts didn’t have the profile of a serial murderer and pedophile, but he had recently admitted to his wife to molesting two young relatives in previous years, and his suicide notes and actions in the schoolhouse indicated an intention to repeat such acts once again.
The anti-gun left has, of course, not missed this opportunity. Instead of blaming evil men for evil acts, they condemn the implements of their crime. Rosie O’Donnell, in one bizarre exchange, even went so far as to claim the Second Amendment of the Constitution is “not really a right.” If guns were the problem, the solution would be simple. Much to the contrary, that which threatens us is decidedly not a gun problem, but a cultural one.
We pray for the families of those lost in these tragedies and for the surviving victims—in this most recent case Amish schoolgirls lacking even a developed concept of social violence, much less a sense of its prevalence in our society. Perhaps there is something we “English” can learn from the Amish here: The value of whole families, raising children apart from a sexual- and violence-saturated media, seeing education as an extension of the home, rejecting our secularized society’s separation of faith and morality and forgiveness, to name but a few. Of note, one Nickel Mines Amish woman summed up the situation this way: “If you have Jesus in your heart and he has forgiven you... [how] can you not forgive other people?”
