Reflections on the Sandy Hook Shooting

Journalists are trained to ask questions: who, what, when, where, how, why? The ‘why’ question is the most important, and also the most difficult to answer. Whenever a mass shooting happens, there is always a search to discover the shooter’s motives. Was he just fired from his job, or did he become estranged from his wife? Is he a “troubled” teen? Was he suffering from a chemical imbalance in his brain? Was he being seen by a psychiatrist? Is he a member of a jihadist terror cell? And so forth, and so on. I use “he” intentionally, because such acts of violence are usually, though not always, committed by males.

There are many different things that can be said about what is wrong with the human race: our psychological and moral immaturity, our pride, our imperialistic ambitions, our fear of foreigners, our blinding self-righteousness, etc. I suggest that another item can be added to this list that may seem (at first) to be unimportant: we are often easily satisfied with “pat answers.” If we hear about a horrific event such as the slaughter of a classroom of first graders in Connecticut, and then think the matter is settled when we are told by the media that this was a “disturbed young man,” we have been satisfied by a pat answer. As a culture, we do not have a track record of pursuing deeper and truer answers, perhaps because we sense that the pursuit would lead us down a path of self-examination that we actively avoid.

News accounts of the Connecticut shooter have said that he was “unable to feel emotional or physical pain.” We ought to question and reject such a facile notion. Anyone who is suicidal, as this young man obviously was, experiences life as a source of tremendous pain. He has decided to end that pain by ending his own life. Some people do precisely that, without doing violence to others. Those who do violence to others before taking their own life are choosing to inflict emotional pain on the survivors. It is as if they are saying, through their actions: “I have suffered pain; now it is your turn to feel pain also. That is my revenge.”

In our society today, the media’s superficial comments on “motives” leave us in a perpetual state of incomprehension. When a shooting happens we say: “I don’t understand why senseless acts of violence like this occur.” Of course it is the case that we don’t understand, because we have not made a serious attempt to do so. How many of us have not read a single article or book on the topic of violence, let alone the dozens that we would need to read to begin to grasp the dimensions of the problem? Because we have no comprehension, we file violent episodes into a cubby hole that holds the acts of deranged individuals who have nothing to teach us about our culture and its pathologies. We do not consider the possibility that a violent act is providing a window into the soul of our culture.

If we do see violent acts as providing insights into our culture, we may be tempted to misuse that intuition by asserting that the acts prove that God is displeased with us because we have abandoned prayer in schools, we teach evolution, we are redefining marriage, we allow abortion, and so forth. Such comments about Sandy Hook have been made by James Dobson and Mike Huckabee. People who have a variety of views on the issues just mentioned can and should recognize the painfully inept cause-and-effect reasoning that lies behind these comments. Dobson and Huckabee are acting like Job’s friends, seeking to point a finger of blame in the wake of immense suffering. “Heretical” is not too strong a word for any view of God that would claim that any slaughter of the innocents is “God’s judgment,” however orthodox the commentators may be in other respects. What is deeply troubling to me about these commentators is that they seem to have no interest at all in actually understanding the psychological motives of the shooter. Dobson is a psychologist and Huckabee is a minister, which makes their comments even more troubling.

While the notion that the Sandy Hook shooter could not feel pain rings hollow, the report that he acted as he did because he knew that his mother might have him committed to the care of mental health professionals rings true. We should take this report as a key to understanding what happened. He was a very psychologically malformed young man, and the prospect that he might actually be forced to be in a situation where people would help him with his problems filled him with panic. We human beings are often immature and we often actively avoid the possibility that we could become more mature. The ultimate means through which we enact this refusal to grow is violence; such a refusal is seen not just in a few isolated, “disturbed,” individuals, but in all of us, to a lesser extent. When we accept as a normal state of affairs the many forms of spiritual sloth that shape our “sane” culture, while seeing the Newtown shooter’s act as a bizarre aberration, it is like one ton of uranium ore saying to one pound of enriched uranium: “You are evil!”

For the person who views the world through pro-life lenses, the shooting at Sandy Hook cannot fail to shine a light on the intense irony of the pro-choice way of thinking and acting. This slaughter of children is described as a horrific crime and a terrible tragedy. Yet the fact that on the same day, as on every day since Roe v. Wade, more than 3,000 unborn children in the U.S. were pureéd by a suction tube (I take the word pureéd from the work of an abortion doctor describing her own practice), dismembered with forceps, or killed through some other means, is lifted up as an example of “liberty” and “progress.” That there might be a remote similarity between the Sandy Hook shooter’s fear of psychological growth and our own fear of growth, which is the energy driving abortion, is a thought that cannot possibly fit into the brain of the pro-choice advocate. President Obama spoke well and expressed the heart of the pro-life vision when he said after Sandy Hook: “This is our first task—caring for our children. It’s our first job. If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right. That’s how, as a society, we will be judged. And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we are meeting our obligations? Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children—all of them—safe from harm? Can we say that we’re truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited upon our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?” Amen! . . . Preach it! . . . Coherently!