Killing Machines

After the attack on September 11, 2001, President Bush sent American troops with the approval of Congress to Iraq because, they feared, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They didn't find them ... sort of. Oh, they found some chemical weapons. And, sure, when al-Assad, president of Syria, started lobbing chemical weapons at his own people, it turns out that they came from Hussein. Worse, the fear now is that ISIL may have some.

For us, of course, WMDs are more like the assault rifle than a chemical or biological weapon. Oh, sure, those exist, but they aren't likely to be used here. So we think of a gun as a weapon of mass destruction. I mean, think relatively. What can be more dangerous, a baseball bat or a knife? Yeah, likely a knife. And what can be more dangerous than a knife? Certainly a gun. And what among guns is the most dangerous? Automatic weapons. Weapons of mass destruction. Okay, at least weapons for the destruction of the masses.

Maybe it's not masses. Maybe it's day-to-day. But it feels like you can't turn around without another school shooting. Wikepedia has a list of school shootings in the United States. And let me tell you--the numbers aren't going down. Gun control and laws and education are not decreasing the numbers of these incidents. So, clearly gun control needs to be stepped up, right?

I would suggest that we're missing the point. Both gun advocates and gun control advocates are arguing that their way will decrease the violence. They miss the stories like the guy in China who attacked students just hours after Sandy Hook happened, stabbing 22 children or the guy in Pittsburgh last April who stabbed his way through 20-some students. Without the WMD called "a gun", people are still killing people and children killing children.

I submit that the gun, then, isn't the killing machine in question. It isn't the bomb or the assault rifle or the handgun or the knife or the lead pipe that is the killing machine. It is the people who wield them. Reports indicate that perhaps school deaths are lower now than in the last 20 years, but violent incidents are up. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2012 students between 12 and 18 experienced more than 1.3 million nonfatal victimizations. And we know that's true, don't we? We know that there is an outcry against bullying and hazing and all that stuff that hurts people ... and maybe even spawns its own violence. You see, it's not the weapon being carried; it's the one carrying the weapon, the weapon from words to explosives.

While we work to disarm adults and kids alike, we are racing to arm our kids with a different set of weapons. These weapons are a disregard for "right" and a removal of any sense of propriety or the value of human life. We argue "You can't legislate morality^[1]" and shout, "Separation of Church and State!" Then we feed them a steady diet of immoral and amoral media feeds. Be sure that it's full of glorified and graphic violence. "There's only so much you can take," the message is given, "and then you're justified in 'going postal' on those people." Make the anti-hero the hero. The best heroes these days are the bad guys who reluctantly do something good. Do not distinguish between the good and the bad except by how writers try to make viewers feel. If there is going to be a depiction of actual "good", be sure to hold it up to ridicule. The best guidance we can give our kids today is to "be true to yourself", to "get in touch with your feelings", to "be all you can be" without guidance of what that "all you can be" should be pursued. (Thus, a teenager who realizes he can make a name for himself by killing as many classmates as possible is satisfying all these points.)

While we inundate them with immoral and amoral^[2] values, we remove many of the safeguards. Once we found refuge in community. If your dad didn't catch you doing that bad thing, a neighbor would and you knew you'd still be in trouble. No more. "Keep your morality off my children!" is our culture's battle cry. Parents once backed teachers who warned them about the misbehavior of their kids, but now they go to war with the school staff in defense of said misbehavior. We've have largely deleted disapprobation. What's that, you say? See what I mean? Disapprobation is strong disapproval primarily on moral grounds. It was frowned on by society to have sex outside marriage, so it pushed young people away from doing it, for instance. Pregnancy out of wedlock was a family shame, so it was avoided if possible and covered up if not. And so it went. Today, of course, we need to be "less judgmental" and "more tolerant" by which we mean "embrace whatever they want to do" and do not try to guide them into any moral values or truth--especially religious truth.

We've removed the safeguards, disconnected the social supports, and replaced a common morality with the opposite. Next, we give them the means to stoke the fires of unrest by allowing them to immerse themselves in the anonymous world of the Internet and arm them with a variety of mechanical devices with which to kill emotionally as well as physically. And then we wonder why we're producing killing machines and complain about ... a handgun. We remove all supports and protections and moral education and replace it with the opposite and wonder why American teenage girls are trying to join ISIL.

Oh, yes, even today there are WMDs in the Middle East. They are currently called "ISIL", but they've had many other names. It's not their weaponry, but their ideology that wields it. And there are killing machines all around us. We refer to some of them as "children". Some of them are armed with nasty weapons and some of those weapons can do a lot of harm, but the weapons are just the means these killing machines use to do what we've trained them to do. For reasons I cannot fathom, many refer to this as "progress".
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^[1] You know that's nonsense, right? I mean, sure, if by that you mean, "You can't make someone moral by passing laws", I'm with you there. But all laws are predicated on some moral value, whether it be the morality of running a red light or the morality of killing someone. You can't legislate morality? We do it all the time. The question is not whether or not you can. The question is whose morality will you use for your legislation? So ruling out, as we do today, the Moral Lawgiver in favor of "how we feel it should be" is still legislating morality, just without a valid basis.

^[2] You might be tempted to think that "immoral" is worse than "amoral". I'm not convinced myself. "Immoral" means opposed to moral. "Amoral" is without morality. That is, one thrusts you toward evil, but the other leaves you without any moral guidance, and who knows where that will take you?