Newtown Tragedy

How do you reconcile the innocents of Christmas with the horrifice nature of a madman walking into an elementary school and shooting children?  You can't.  A friend of mine put it well when seeking solutions.

"Bear with me. I'm trying to process a few things and have been sharing to help with that as well as hear others opinions. That being said I have a few thoughts on the Sandy Hook School Shooting. 1) controlling guns is not going to solve this issue. He was a crazed man who would have found a way regardless of laws. Yes we can make things harder for criminals, but if they want to do harm they are going to find a way.


"2) there are no right or wrong answers about how we can prevent this in the future. We simply have no answers as to why and only the killers have those answers. We can do our best to figure it out and hope it's enough to make a difference, but unless we start taking blinders off of our eyes and see that there are some people in this world that really are evil we can't change.

"3)we need to take an honest look at mental health in this country. We need to stop labeling those who do not need labels and HELPING those that need help. Parents need to stop pretending that children can never do wrong and see that they can. We need to learn the warning signs for potentially dangerous people and get them help. And we need to give law officials a chance to do the same.

"4) parents need to teach their children violence is NEVER a solution to their anger or fear. We need to teach them that anger and fear are healthy but that we need to address it appropriately and calmly."

She's right.  They didn't need guns in Oklahoma City.  They used common fertilizer.  People are shifting blame to guns.  To schools.  To video games.  (For the record, I won't play games like Call of Duty for this reason.  It's one thing to shoot aliens or zombies.  It's something else to go for realism that my friends have lived through.  There is something wrong about fantasizing about real deaths and tragedy.) 

The bottom line is evil just exists in the world sometimes.  Like 9-11, OK City, Aurora, and Newtown.  People like Osama bin Laden, Timothy McVay, Joseph Stalin, and Adolph Hitler.  Part of me thinks we will never truly understand these people.  At least I won't.  You can't legislate morality.  This boy didn't have a legal issue or a self-esteem issue.  He was not right in the head, and for some reason, did an act of great evil. 

The hope for this world isn't the law.  It isn't a political party.  It isn't video games, or lack thereof.  The only cure for evil is Jesus. 

Then again, that's what Christmas is really about, isn't it?