REFLECTIONS ON SANDY HOOK by Pam Blair

Reflections on Sandy Hook

By Pam Blair

The episode at Sandy Hook Elementary School was an unspeakable horror, a senseless series of actions that brought endless pain and loss to the families involved and to a stunned nation.  Americans wept at the news of the Sandy Hook tragedy as if they had known the victims, and they hugged their own children and grandchildren closer, reminded of the fragility of life and realizing anew the treasure that little ones are.

Now, two weeks later, with the funerals over and much of the police investigation off  TV screens and the internet, we are left to ponder in the aftermath of such a heinous act: Why?  Why would a single mother find the need to own an assault rifle?  Why did her son, a young man with obvious mental and emotional imbalance, have access to weapons of such destructive capacity?  Why did he choose to murder uninvolved school children and the adults whose lives were dedicated to helping them learn and grow?  Frustratingly, we will never know the answers to these questions.

We turn, therefore, to other more general questions for which we may find at least partial answers:  Would stronger gun laws have prevented this and other similar tragedies that have occurred in the US?  Would greater attention to and more effective treatment of mentally ill people serve the same purpose?  What can we do as a nation to prevent further horrific happenings like this?

Anti-gun proponents protest, arguing that stronger restrictions on weapon purchase will take weapons out of the hands of crazy people who shoot strangers without provocation, as well as those who shoot acquaintances and even family members with (at least what they perceive as) provocation.  While I agree that there is no conceivable reason that any civilian has need for a combat weapon that can fire five rounds per second nor clips that contain thirty or more rounds, disarming our populace seems impractical at best and impossible at worst. 

Alongside calls for weapons reform come the cries for more extensive mental health education, identification, and treatment.  Who can argue the benefits of more help for those individuals and families staggering under the frightening challenges of dealing with emotional disorders that lead to aggression and harm?  And what about the internet and violent on-line gaming and the isolation from actual people that can result from obsession with technology?  These are legitimate problems that need to be addressed.

I would argue, however, that neither arms control nor mental health issues nor violence on the internet, significant though each is, stands as an ultimate cause of our deep-seated problem, which permeates the very essence of our national being.   I would look beyond those symptomatic issues to the more essential cause, which reflects itself in a desire for weapons that can mutilate and murder, in the increasing mental problems that rob people and communities of rich, full lives, and/or in addiction to the internet.

I would argue that as a nation, we have lost our moral bearings.  Rather than acknowledging God as creator and, yes, owner of human life, and living within the laws He has established for individual behavior and the rightful functioning of community life, we have driven Him from schools and courtrooms, from the marketplace, from the town square.  We have substituted human wisdom (and I use that term questionably) and human policies and laws for divine wisdom and God’s laws.  We have made ourselves into our own gods, and like the man who hires himself as his own lawyer, we have become fools.  

How many Sandy Hooks, how many Columbines, how many dead children, how many dead firemen, how many destroyed lives will it take before we can humble ourselves enough to admit that we don’t have the answers--not individually, not even collectively?  The answers are available to us, but they do not arise from us.  As long as we are absorbed with arguing about how to deal with the symptoms of our national values void, we will fail to realize that a revival of faith is necessary to ensure a land of democracy and peace.

We need to call on God, acknowledge that we are sinners in His sight, and receive the forgiveness and healing that only He can deliver.  Any other route is merely swatting at symptoms, thinking that eliminating them will solve our problems.  It won’t.  The problem lies in the hearts of people, from which their actions spring.  Only by dealing with the root cause of our problem can we eliminate its symptoms.  And we can’t deal with the root until we recognize what it is.

Our nation, perhaps unknowingly, cries out for a return to faith in something outside of and larger than ourselves—to faith in God.  We want to claim aspects of faith—heaven, Christmas and Easter, prayer—without acknowledging the tenets of the faith, without submitting ourselves to God.   We need to confess that we have lost our way as a nation and ask God to restore us.  That is the only real first step to healing the painful reality of Sandy Hook.