WHY ALL THE KILLING?

The American media has just highlighted another murder this past week by a teenage at his school. In fact, most of the time it is a young boy or young man and most often it is someone not psychologically stable, and most often it involves guns. It seems that this kind of thing is occurring nearly every week. And in fact, they have been. Since the Sandy Hook massacre, there have been 74 murders, and sometimes mass murders, at public places. So in 18 months, that’s one a week. Yet that’s not the full story. Here’s more of the story.

Every single day (not just every week) there are 46 murders committed in the United States.

86% of these are by guns and only 24-28% are due to aggravated assaults.

Deaths by stabbing: 10,000 per year means there are — 37 per day

Deaths by accidents on highways, 34,080 (2012) — 93 per day.

Deaths by falling (most within a person’s home): 26,008 — 71 per day

Deaths by poisoning: 33,041 — 90 per day.

All unintentional injury deaths: 120,859 — 331 per day.

Deaths by suicide: 3,255 per year — 9 per day.

In total, there are 2,423,712 deaths in the US per year. (Information in www.wikipedia.com and from wiki.answers.com).

Last week there was another young boy who murdered people. He first used a knife and stabbed three of his roommates to death, then he took a gun to shot some innocent girls, and finally he used his car to run over and maim others. The media focused on and blamed the gun. For them, that was the most obvious thing to blame. “The gun did it!” Yet, if only it was that simple. If there were more deaths by knifing than by guns (as there is in the UK), we could yell, “The knife did it!” Or we could also yell, “The car did it and ban cars!”

Yet all of these are just instruments. And what shall we say of murders by suicides, falls, poisoning, etc.? In fact, worldwide more people are killed by knives than guns. The over-simplistic answer is to outlaw guns and knives. Of course, after that we would have to ban baseball bats and all other sharp and blunt objects.

Yet in all of this, banning only deals with symptoms, not the cause. The problem is the out-of- control state of the one killing, or the deliberate revenge state, or the desperate state, or the envious and jealous state, or any other state which a person gets into that leads to the killing. The problem is the state— and the kind of thinking which supposes that we can solve things by killing people who we blame for making our lives miserable.

The problem is even deeper than that. Behind those hateful states and that distorted way of thinking is the lack of resources in being able to cope with life and the lack of a strong sense of morality which eliminates even considering killing someone. And contributing factors to all of that goes to our education system that teaches kids everything but the most important things—

How to create and access a solid and valued sense of self.

How to create and access the ego-strength for coping with life’s disappointments. How to create and access a moral conscience that cares about others. How to create and access a sense of responsibility for self and to others. How to create and access a healthy sense of state management (emotional intelligence).

All of this goes into create a larger problem—the kind of culture where killing is so readily considered a solution. Today in America we don’t teach “values” in schools because the values will offend someone and someone else will scream “Religious infiltration.” We don’t hold people responsible for their unkind actions for fear of hurting their so-called “self-esteem.” We produce movies full of violence and horror and do so without any restrictions claiming that “it is just entertainment” and “it could not possibly influence the thinking, feeling, and actions of people.” We produce movies and magazines glorifying wealth, status, and fame and we have a culture where movie stars and sports heros are paid outrageous salaries and then wonder why there’s eating disorders among girls and sexual abuse and violence among boys. “It couldn’t be the movies and magazines, everyone knows that’s just entertainment!”

In all of this we also do not teach and enable kids and young people how to watch the so-called “Reality shows,” horror movies, news, internet, social media so that it does not inflict semantic damage within in.

How to watch such and think critically about the truthfulness of the content. How to distinguish “movie reality” and fantasy from real life. How to cope with their human needs in a healthy and appropriate way.

So every time another mass murder occurs and we ask, “Why this senseless killing?” “What is driving these people to do such things?” The answer is there but it is invisible. It is in the culture in which we live and in which we hardly notice.

What if the key driving factors in all of this lies in the killer’s mind? What if that person is not thinking in a rational and healthy way? What if the person has not learned the basics of critical thinking, of effective coping to meet the needs of life, and of being a caring, responsible human being to others?

What if it is not true that they have some “need” for anger, sex, revenge, power, or any other normal human response? What if their thinking, believing, understanding, and the kind of thinking full of cognitive distortions is itself the problem and instead of being healthy, is itself neurotic? What if they have created a distorted, neurotic “need” within them— a neurotic need that now expresses itself as it does? What if they actually have a self-actualization need within them to be creative and to live one’s life with creative engagement and it is stunned, undeveloped, blocked?

If that’s the real problem, then banning the instruments used for the killing will never solve the problem. The real solution lies in actualizing the humanity of persons. That’s where the leverage point for change will true occur.