An open letter to David Hogg about why school shootings occur

Dear David –

It must be quite an experience to be on nationwide TV at your age. While I fully support your right to protest things you believe are wrong, I respectfully disagree that school carnage will end if semiautomatic rifles are banned, and hope you’ll take a few minutes to let me share my thinking on the issue.

When I was in high school in the early 1960s, there were no school shootings. The only times I remember seeing a police officer at school was once a year to give a talk about obeying the law. Only occasionally were policemen summoned to schools to deal with threatening students. Today, after the profound cultural changes our society has undergone since the 1960s, threatening behavior by students is commonplace—as I’m sure you know, Nikolas Cruz was threatening other students long before he did the unthinkable.

The dramatic increase in delinquent behavior by students is why most schools in America have at least one full-time police officer. Some schools have more. Like its counterparts in other large cities, the public schools system in Detroit has its own police department, which employees hundreds of investigators, campus police officers, security personnel and a K-9 unit. Why is it necessary for school districts to have their own police department? The answer is a national tragedy—schools in our largest cities and counties have become places where lawless behavior by students is so prevalent that police must be close at hand. Prior to the anything goes ‘sex, drugs and rock & roll’ cultural revolution that began in 1968, school systems that had their own police department were non-existent.

If, as I believe, banning semiautomatic rifles will not put a dent in school shootings, what will? Here’s my answer. Most school shootings are carried out by severely disturbed young white males whose thought processes went haywire due to acute mental illness or a dysfunctional childhood (or both, as was the case with Nikolas Cruz). Another reason for school shootings can be laid squarely at the feet of the corrosive cultural decline of the society in which these deranged mass murderers developed their upside down sense of right and wrong.

The anything goes progressive culture that permeates virtually every facet our society teaches these young madmen the politically correct concept of moral relativism, the idea that moral judgments are values that vary, depending on the viewpoints of differing cultural norms. In other words, there is no clear-cut right and wrong. If you believe it’s okay to throw homosexuals from roof tops—an approved practice in some Muslim countries—who’s to say that’s wrong? It’s what your native culture believes. In contemporary society, troubled young minds receive mixed messages about what’s permissible and, far more importantly, what’s totally off limits.

When I was your age, David, kids had ready access to guns, but not to violent imagery. Young people of today are bombarded with gratuitously violent movies and video games that make the act of pumping bullets into human beings seem almost hip. Some studies show little connection between such viewing and mass shootings. But, how can a constant stream of bloody visual carnage not have a profoundly negative impact on troubled young minds? All of the simulated violence that blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality is knowingly mainlined into the consciousness of today’s youth by the entertainment industry and its anything goes progressive values.

Progressive curricula in our schools and colleges teach future white male mass murderers to be ashamed not only of their country, but their skin color, as well. Their already confused minds are methodically indoctrinated with white privilege, a political narrative that leads some to racial self-loathing. Militant feminism further erodes their self-worth by stereotyping them with the invented male flaw known as toxic masculinity. Message: They’re not only white and male, God forbid, they’re also—by definition—wildly cruel to women. The constant assault on their gender and skin color leaves many of them as broken young men who withdraw into isolation and anger.

Our society’s anything goes culture teaches mentally troubled young white males to loathe themselves, that right and wrong are malleable concepts, and that viewing simulated images of gory violence is a cool way to have a good time. No wonder some of them turn into mass murderers. Through its relentless indoctrination in political correctness, multiculturalism, racial politics and ‘social justice,’ our culture is further screwing up the already screwed-up minds of future school shooters. The dramatic cultural upheaval since I was in school also coincides almost perfectly with the sharp increase in self-inflicted deaths by young people—the CDC reports that the suicide rate among the age group 15 to 19 reached its highest point in 40 years in 2015, the most recent year those statistics were available.

Finally, David, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2016, four times more people were stabbed to death than were killed by rifles, including semi-automatics. Those deaths are just as tragic as the ones taken by Nikolas Cruz, yet no sane person would call for banning knives. Left at rest, a loaded gun is incapable of spontaneously discharging. The only way it can kill is if a human picks it up and fires it. Making guns the scapegoat for school shootings is no different than blaming DUI homicides on cars and trucks. I have never been arrested and have no history of mental illness. Other than home invaders, my AR-15 poses a threat to no one, and taking such weapons away from responsible people like me wouldn’t stop a single school shooting, not one.

The battle we face is not against inanimate objects that are used by sick people to kill. The battle is against the mental illnesses, addictions and cultural depravity that cause people to do bad things.

Respectfully,

John Eidson
Atlanta, GA

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image of David Hogg, a student at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, his fist in the air as he speaks during the “March for Our Lives” event demanding gun control after recent school shootings at a rally in Washington, U.S., March 24, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst.

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