What’s the response for violence?

Down the road from here, the latest violent rampage broke out yesterday on yet another college campus, with seven young people now dead. “Latest” is becoming an even more relative term than it already is, when applied to a school shooting story, and that has numbed our sensibilities. By the time you read this, God only knows whether there will be more…

There are no words to capture the horror of what has gradually become a ‘trend’, the sudden appearance of a gun wielding maniac in a public place who opens fire and sprays bullets randomly into a crowd of innocent people. Or, as in the recent case in Tinley Park south of Chicago, a gunman who enters a ladies clothing store, ties up the women there and executes them with shots to the head. There were multiple shootings that week in public places. There were multiple shootings this week, the Northern Illinois University massacre yesterday only the “latest”.

The shooting was the fourth at a U.S. school within a week.

This morning, I drove through the campus of North Central Illinois on the way to church, where people prayed for the students, their families and the college community where disaster shattered their routine lives yesterday. Looking at these students going to class this morning at a very similar college, I wondered if they were afraid that it might happen there. It’s unnatural not to. I thought about my son on a big university campus in another state, and thought “My God, it could happen there, or anywhere, at any time, and there’s no way to protect against it.” It could happen at a fast food place as it has before, or the ladies clothing store, or that mall shooting during the busy Christmas season.

It has become regular news, as regular as Hollywood celebrity meltdowns and missing children/co-eds/women reports these days that fill the airwaves of the news shows, especially prime time. And they’re all symptoms of the crisis that John Paul II called the culture of death. Life is devalued in any one place, by extension it pervades the thinking and behavior and laws about life in other places because any opening to justify control over life can be widened. And it has.

We now have ‘campus shooting experts’ – a jarring reality – and one of them gave the chilling explanation today that violent video games have played a big role in helping shooters prepare for their rampage, the simulation allowing them to role play their eventual attack. He said these shooters – including the one yesterday – even dress like the dark characters in the violent videos, imitating the whole scenario and bringing it into reality. Columbine showed us that they just blur the lines between fantasy actions and the consequences of shooting real guns at real people. The shooters are always fully armed.

Kevin Cronin of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said those weapons were a Remington model 870 12-gauge shotgun and a Glock 9 mm pistol…

Grady said the gunman parked on campus near Cole Hall, where the shootings took place, and entered the lecture hall through a door that opened onto a stage.

He carried a guitar case that apparently held the shotgun and had other weapons hidden under his coat.

These mass murders are the springboard for others who harbor dark thoughts.

The shooting came weeks after DeKalb police investigated in December writings on a dormitory wall that made references to the Virginia Tech shootings.

The Virginia Tech shootings. The Amish children massacred in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. The Christmas shoppers cut down at a suburban mall.

One of the students interviewed by local radio today who was in that auditorium when the shooting started described it with far more matter-of-fact reporting of the incident than it warranted. It warranted horror. Are we capable of that?

I’ve seen articles by psychological experts who point out that this generation of young adults already knows they have survived abortion, and they know many who would be their peers did not. Listening to that young student say she “hit the floor to save my life” made me realize that their whole reality is increasingly of life in the survival mode.

We must do better than this. It starts with being responsible for ourselves and our children and refusing to accept cheapened forms of entertainment and social interaction. Because if it doesn’t start with that, it ends with more violence.