Neighborhood Ministries

People wring their hands and wonder what to do. The politicians and media come up with the obvious. Background checks-Practically all these mass shooters either obtained the guns illegally or had no record that would have stopped the sale, even with a background check. Take away everyone’s guns-The only guns you get are the ones of innocent people trying to protect themselves. Once they are disarmed, the criminals have a field day. Crime and violence escalate quickly. Most mass shootings take place in places where guns aren’t allowed. The shooters know that when they pick their targets. They don’t want to be interrupted by people with guns.  The guy in Texas wasn’t wearing a bullet-proof vest because he wanted to make a fashion statement. Once they are over, the investigations usually reveal a long trail so obvious a blind man could have followed it. The guy in Texas was a typical shooter. He was a loner, who felt no one cared. He was often bullied, then constantly in trouble, then labeled a trouble-maker, then spread his anger all over the social media, but at each stage, nobody listened. What would it take to get their attention? He bragged about doing something big, displayed his guns for all to see, but nobody listened. He killed his grandmother and broadcast that, but nobody listened. There is only one thing left. The more people he killed, the more people would pay attention, and they did.  By then it was too late. Why did he have to go that far before someone listened? In the beginning, all that was needed was for someone to show him they cared. One person or a small group could have stopped it at any point if they had only listened. The farther it goes, the harder it is to stop.

While I don’t encourage people to carry guns, I don’t believe that limiting gun ownership will solve the problem. The shooter at Columbine High School had a variety of bombs in the school that he was going to set off after he shot a lot of people. Fortunately, he was stopped before he could set them off. Outlawing guns would not have stopped him. If he could not have gotten the guns, he probably would have still tried to set off the bombs. We need to stop the people that are going to do these things. The media played up the fact that this was totally unexpected, and no one knew about it until it happened. However, the shooter had broadcast that he was going to do something like that for almost two years, but no one paid any attention to him. On his way to school that day, he told a friend he met to turn around and go home because he should not go to school that day. Most school shooters have left a long trail of warnings which no one paid any attention to. A lot of incidents you have never heard about, have not happened because someone stopped to listen. In fact, the shooters are usually loners who were bullied or ignored and feel this is their way to get noticed. We need to reach these people before they reach the point of violence.