Slaughter of the Innocents

 

Slaughter of the Innocents

 This started out as an answer to Daniel Lewis’ comment on my previous post about the frequency of recent mass shootings.  It ran on and on, so I’m posting separately.

 One reason for “the nut or criminal behind the gun” is the release of the mentally ill into our communities in the 1950’s and 1960’s, in hopes that psychoactive drugs will replace the mental hospitals of the past.

 Quoting from the “New York Times”:

 “THE policy that led to the release of most of the nation's mentally ill patients from the hospital to the community is now widely regarded as a major failure. Sweeping critiques of the policy, notably the recent report of the American Psychiatric Association, have spread the blame everywhere, faulting politicians, civil libertarian lawyers and psychiatrists.

 Many of the psychiatrists involved as practitioners and policy makers in the 1950's and 1960's said in the interviews that heavy responsibility lay on a sometimes neglected aspect of the problem: the overreliance on drugs to do the work of society.”

 And from “The Healthy Place”:

 “In the mid-1950s the numbers of hospitalized mentally ill peaked at 560,000 in the United States. This, plus the advent of effective psychiatric medication, led to many mentally ill people being removed from institutions and directed towards local mental health facilities. The number of institutionalized mentally ill dropped to 130,000 in 1980.”

 So, hundreds of thousands of mentally ill patients were released into society after 1950.  What the above paragraph omits to say is that many of these patients ended up in prisons, where they were radicalized to crime, or to homelessness, and an anarchic, lawless existence.

 These links refer:

 https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-mental-patients-began.html

 https://nami.org/mhstats

 https://www.npr.org/2017/11/30/567477160/how-the-loss-of-u-s-psychiatric-hospitals-led-to-a-mental-health-crisis

 https://www.healthyplace.com/other-info/mental-illness-overview/the-history-of-mental-illness

  

Another reason for mass shootings:

 Why does an eighteen year old, (one in New York State, and one in Texas), pick up guns, don body armor, and kill multiple people in a super market, on the one hand, and multiple small children in an elementary school, on the other?

 Part of the answer, I’m sure, lies in some form of mental illness as described above.  Another revolves around the apathy toward human life resulting from the many media outlets depicting a rank disregard for human life.  BANG! Goes the video game recording a “kill”, as red splatters on the screen, and an acknowledgement point is rewarded.  Same with “action movies”, where “the enemy” violently dispatched.  And our kids participate in this ersatz carnage as soon as they can sit up and hold the controls.  Our kids are desensitized to violence from babies onward. What do we expect from this exposure, - a respect for human life?

  

There are myriad other reasons, dishonest leaders, false prophets, personal betrayals, that can skew and twist a young person’s psyche, but the over-riding reason is spiritual desolation due to lack of spiritual or religious beliefs.  People all over the world are drifting away from religion, including our young people.

 According to Gallup: “The decline in formal church membership has largely been driven by younger generations of Americans. About one in three U.S. young adults have no religious affiliation. Further, many young adults who do identify with a religion nevertheless do not belong to a church. But even older adults who have a religious preference are less likely to belong to a church today than in the past.”

 Our kids are marinated in internet and entertainment industry violence, while eschewing the Christian belief systems and morals and ethics of their forebearers.

 Even when raised in strong Christian churches, our young people drift away from religion when exposed to agnostic or atheist secular beliefs as part of public or university schooling, or just living in the secular world.  Innovative approaches such as Mike Baughman’s Union Coffee Shop in Dallas aimed at bringing young people back into a spiritual environment, and keeping them focused spiritually have had some success in bringing young professionals back to God.  https://www.uniondallas.org/our-story/

  

What exacerbates the whole issue is the instant availability in everyone’s pocket, of access to all of the knowledge of the world, and the audio/visual means to disseminate it to anyone in the world.  Who needs God, when one can wield such power by manipulating a screen on 3” x 4” device?

 Being a technical puke, I hate to acknowledge it, but our modern world and its technology also contributes to some teenager being able to kill 20 innocent children.

  

How do we get out of this propensity for another demented young man to slaughter masses of innocent people and children?  We can preach at it and say, “Return to God”.  HOW?? 

 It seems that we need almost a Messiah on the order of a Jesus Christ to rectify our spiritual malaise, and we need a political leader on the order of a Washington or Lincoln to cure our political sickness.

 We can pray, and hope that time will bring the cure.  And we can each do our part, by being respectful Christians and citizens, and try to teach our young people to be the same.

 Ray Gruszecki

May 25, 2022