O God, whose praise the martyred Innocents on this day confessed, not by speaking, but by dying: destroy in us all the evils of sin that our life also may proclaim in deeds Thy faith which our tongues profess. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost . . . (Collect, Feast of the Holy Innocents, Martyrs)

I live ten miles from one of the most dreadful and murderous school shootings in American history, which, in those violent annals, is saying something.  I write these words just nine hours after yet another agent of the Culture of Death senselessly slaughtered 26 of my neighbors, including 20 children.  In an act so evil as to almost defy belief, the Associated Press reports:

NEWTOWN, Conn. — A man opened fire Friday inside two classrooms at the Connecticut elementary school where his mother worked as a teacher, killing 26 people, including 20 children, as youngsters cowered in corners and closets and trembled helplessly to the sound of gunfire reverberating through the building.  The killer, armed with two handguns, committed suicide at the school and another person was found dead at a second scene, bringing the toll to 28, authorities said.

This tragedy is exceptionally horrifying, since  those murdered were mostly kindergarteners – kindergarteners!  Moreover, as I am sure will be the case for many who live here in our community of Western Connecticut, it is also personal – I know someone very well whose little guy was among those slaughtered today.  I too am a father of a kindergartener.  I weep for him and his wife and all of the families of the little slain innocents.  The horrifying—no, stupefying!—reaction in my head is just to keep screaming no, no, no.  Why would anyone – how could anyone – do this to children hardly removed from their mothers’ breasts?

My heart is so full of brokenness and sorrow I can scarcely grasp what has happened. Such depravity!

As I drove home from work tonight,  with a dull numbness pervading, I dreaded the fact that the liberal establishment would take this occasion to launch yet another campaign against gun rights.  Even in the sickness I felt while processing this tragedy, complete with all the remorse for the victims and their families, I was angry at the thought that this too would be politicized. 

While I own guns of my own, and believe any American ought to have the right to bear arms, threats to the Second Amendment is just not something that keeps me up at night.  As any child can see, the problem in this country is not lawful gun ownership, and we should indeed fear governments that monopolize coercive power to such an extent that private gun ownership could well be outlawed.

That said, the rights of gun owners is still not at the top of my list of concerns.

So, I am amazed at the speed at which The New York Times posted an editorial capitalizing on the deaths of children to lobby for yet another one of their liberal causes: banning guns.  The Gray Lady opined:

Each slaughter of innocents seems to get more appalling. A high school. A college campus. A movie theater. People meeting their congresswoman. A shopping mall in Oregon, just this Tuesday. Today, a kindergarten classroom.... The assault weapons ban enacted under President Clinton was deficient and has expired. Mr. Obama talked about the need for “common sense” gun control after the movie theater slaughter in Aurora, Colo., and he hinted during the campaign that he might support a new assault weapons ban, presumably if someone else introduced it.... The more that we hear about gun control and nothing happens, the less we can believe it will ever come. Certainly, it will not unless Mr. Obama and Congressional leaders show the courage to make it happen.

This editorial was posted less than eight hours after the shootings, almost as if it were canned, like obituaries written in advance for elderly celebrities or politicians.   I was reminded of a lawyer handing out business cards at the scene of fatal car crash.

It is not gun-control absolutism that infuriates me about these predictable liberals.  Rather it is the realization that these sanctimonious censurers are themselves at least partially to blame. 

While one hesitates to even suggest it, maybe there are too many guns… maybe.  But what happened in Newtown cannot be blamed on guns any more than what happened to Julius Caesar can be blamed on knives.  No,  what is at work here is of far greater consequence and has everything to do with a systemic force of cultural violence and immorality. 

The editorial page of The New York Times has been reliably at the forefront of nearly every wrong moral turn our society has taken over the last fifty years.  Her wrong-headed moral sagacity has helped to hone and  create the very cultural conditions in which widespread lawlessness and nihilism has now gripped our nations' young people.  She is the one at war with God.  She is the one that approvingly counsels free sexual liaisons and homosexuality.  She is the one that applauds a revolting culture of abortion.  She is the one that lauds obscenity as artistic expression.  She is the one that posits a relativistic worldview that we can say with absolute certainty represents a complete inversion of right and wrong.  And far more than guns, what is important here is the cultural malignancy that must necessarily be festering at the heart of our society to allow such a violent culture of death to exist in the first place.

What did The New York Times think, in exercising her counter-magisterium, would come of her embrace of secularism, atheism, nihilism?   The generation of young people coming of age have been fed a steady diet of gratuitously violent and obscene imagery – in movies, music, television, the internet, video games, etc.  The “arts” have become little more than a cesspool of depravity.  Young people have been raised in a culture that rejects absolute truth, including objective right and wrong.  They have been taught that life, including their own, lacks intrinsic value to such an extent that killing babies in utero should be celebrated as a liberating act of freewill. 

Indeed, all their lives young people have been taught that science has proven we are merely more developed animals—devoid of conscience and thus moral culpability.  Here in this brave new world of ours atheism is a right, death is a choice and God doesn’t exist.  So, again, what did they thing would happen!

Kids are not stupid; a culture of Godless nihilism produces nihilists and anarchists so devoid of morality as to be easily produce monsters like one which walked into the kindergarten down the street and started shooting holes in innocent kids. 

Only time will tell perhaps why this twenty-year-old shooter took the lives of his mother and these little kids; but he lived in a society whose masters relentlessly insist that life has no real value, that babies can be killed at will, that old people can be euthanized, and that even suicide itself is a basic human right.  They created this monster, and guns had nothing to do with it!

So instead of tired and predictable liberal media screeds, where leftist activists hypocritically lay the blame somewhere else, shouldn’t they pick up a mirror and gaze into it if they really want to find what the problem is?    

I’m not the only one shocked by what we’ve become; but when do we admit that we ourselves are to blame for the blood that now flows in the streets and in the abortuaries and the kindergartens of our homeland.

Lord, comfort those who suffer grievously in this most terrible moment.  You who beckoned the children to come unto You, welcome these little ones into your  heavenly abode.  Give your children and your sons who still remain among the living, the courage to proclaim that which is right and to oppose what is so wrong, even as we endeavor to serve You better and to do all in our limited power to build up your Kingdom of Light even down here in this world of darkness.  

In this Valley of Tears,

Mother Most Pure, Pray for Us.