During a recent broadcast of an NBA conference playoff game, the game announcer requested a moment of silence on behalf of the people, mostly children, killed in the latest school shooting in Texas. He also implored the crowd to fight for stricter gun control laws. Although it’s tempting to say that stricter laws, including background checks, would prevent such tragedies, it’s actually diverting attention from the real cause, and possible prevention, of school shootings.
Although the continued availability of semi-automatic weapons for teenagers is a topic worthy of debate, the fact is that there are many guns out there that are not used to kill innocent people. To say that the means of killing is the cause of killing is specious at best. The cause of such killings is the person who decides on such a course of action, not the means chosen to realize it. In recent memory we have the Oklahoma City bombing of the Murrah Federal Building, which also destroyed a preschool and killed lots of children. The perpetrator didn’t use a gun, he used common substances, fertilizer, oil, and propane, which are of undeniable benefit and for the most part are used for their intended purpose. There was also the recent case of a man who drove his car down a street closed for the purpose of a public celebration, killing many innocent people. He did not use a gun, he used a car, which is a widely accepted modern convenience, and usually used properly. Nobody to my knowledge has suggested getting rid of cars, oil, propane or fertilizer because of these demented people. The problem of school shootings or any other type of mass shooting, like the Las Vegas concert incident, is not a gun problem, but a person problem.
People are the problem, and people are the solution. To focus on the superficial aspects of the problem is to divert attention from the real problem, which is essentially philosophical and spiritual in nature. Anybody buying a gun or any other dangerous item and using it to hurt others is doing something profoundly irrational. Yet in their defense, irrational things are being done all around them, notably by the very people who fight most vociferously against gun ownership. For the sake of simplicity, I will call the agenda which militates for gun control while demonstrating irrational behavior as Progressive. And what does it encourage that is irrational? The one factor which most progressive initiatives share is a desire to separate cause and effect. It appears as though by eliminating any consideration of the future consequences of behavior, one can legitimize any plan of action. And when people cannot conceive of the consequences of their actions, then there is no limit on what they might do. Let me give some examples of how progressive initiatives do in fact separate the notions of cause and effect, and thereby produce bad behavior.
First, let’s look at what used to be called traditional morality. The most glaring example of how the progressive agenda undermines rational cause and effect is to look at the matter of sex. In the Bible, sex is the subject of the first command given by God to man, that we be fruitful and multiply, a command given even before the fall. Thus, sex is inextricably associated with reproduction. The introduction of the Pill, the legalization of abortion, and the promotion of homosexual rights are all a direct attack on the link between sex and children. As an anti-abortion protester recently said at a Washington rally, “Abortion is not health care; pregnancy is not a disease.” The recent Supreme Court decision that says that marriage is not necessarily between a biological man and woman, while seeming to be virtuous and inclusive, merely accelerated the disconnection between sex and reproduction. Sex is no longer about two, potentially three people, it’s now about one. It’s not about the future, it’s about the present. It’s not about anything other than transient sensation of the individual participant.
By now you can see that the separation of cause and effect can quickly move from the personal to the societal and political level. You print money, you get inflation. You defund the police, you get crime. You open the borders, you get skewed voting results, drugs, human trafficking and a stressed health network. You legalize recreational drugs, and you get a society that thinks about little beyond when they can get high again. On not just on those drugs, but all drugs. How can you say that one psychotropic drug is okay, but others are not okay? There is no distinction in the mind of the drug addict between this drug and that. There’s only the goal of putting narcissistic sensation above the business of living.
The disassociation of cause and effect can also be entitled “unintended consequences.” Pass laws that give financial assistance, welfare, to homes where there is no male or father, and you get homes with no male or father. Although this initiative seemed noble at the time, helping black families at the bottom of the economic pyramid, it has produced disastrous consequences just a few decades later. The current reality is that three fourths of black children have no father on the premises, and all the well-documented problems that reality implies.
But let’s get back to schools. You take prayer out of schools, and the devil moves in. As Jesus said, if you’re not for him, you’re against him. The expulsion of prayer, chapel services, and Christian meetings from public schools has left a spiritual void where students, to say nothing of teachers, have no grounding for decisions. If there is no right, there is no wrong, and pretty soon you’ve got kids who are spiritually adrift making bad decisions that lead to headlines. We all hear voices, and if you don’t believe in God or the Devil, you won’t know who’s speaking. Take this kid in Texas who shot a bunch of small children. He apparently had no ability to see the future for himself or others; a common problem of those bereft of philosophical formation. If there is no heaven, as John Lennon advocated, then there is no hell. The shooter in Texas is quite certainly in hell, saying as the rich man said in Luke, “Send Lazarus to my father’s house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place or torment.” Abraham demurred, pointing out that the brothers, lacking spiritual direction in the form of obedience to the Scriptures, were set on a course of similar destruction.
In Numbers 22 Balaam beats his donkey for disobeying his commands. He’s focused on the donkey, because the donkey is the proximate cause of his discomfort. It is only as his eyes are opened to the presence of the Lord, and the fact that he is opposing the Lord’s will, that he understands the problem is not the donkey, but the nature of his errand. The same can be said of a society that tolerates the disassociation of natural cause and effect. The Lord has created a world where there is a close association between action and reaction, so that we will perceive the ordered, systematic, beautiful character of the creator. Francis Schaeffer says,
“In contrast to Eastern thinking, the Hebrew-Christian tradition affirms that God has created a true universe outside of himself. When I use this term ‘outside of himself,’ I do not mean it in a spatial sense; I mean that the universe is not an extension of the essence of God. It is not just a dream of God. There is something there to think about, to deal with and to investigate which has objective reality. Christianity gives a certainty of objective reality and of cause and effect, a certainty that is strong enough to build on. Thus the object, and history, and cause and effect really exist.”
You put your hand in fire, it will be burned. Not the fault of the fire, the fault of the fool who put his hand in it. You jump off a cliff, and you are injured or killed. Not the fault of the cliff or gravity, the fault is of the person who jumped. When are we going to see that our generation has failed to instruct the next in the simple idea that God exists, and hence principle of cause and effect is binding? Even though we relax our laws in the interests of inclusion and compassion, we are actually short circuiting the most elemental feature of Creation, and the means the Creator has established for revealing Himself and how we ought to think and live. If you want to ban something, how about the video games which train people to kill, steal and destroy the opposition, with the added crime of being able to hit a reset button and start all over again?
As Jim Rayburn, founder of Young Life said, “Without Jesus, these kids just don’t have a chance.” There is no such thing as a neutral position with regard to God and the way he has created our world. You either obey him, which is another way of saying you worship and love him, or you oppose not only him but the very essence of his creation. His laws are immutable, and when you disobey them, you don’t get freedom, you get solitude. At best.
