As we pray for the victims and survivors of the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting please keep in mind the family of the shooter Santino William Legan.
Santino Legan lists himself as Italian Iranian on his Instagram account, and the press is bending over backwards to ignore that bit of information. I'm not blaming his muslim background, but there is a chance that he may be allowing his heritage to color his current outlook. I've known several Irish young men who would get drunk and angry over the treatment of their ancestors. My response to one was "Dude, your dad owns 3,000 acres of some of the most fertile land on earth and you earn a fortune working his farm, how are things that happened 100 years ago affecting your life?" His response started with "Shut up you..." and continued with nothing that I will relate here.
Maureen Callahan recently wrote in the New York Post an article which blatantly tells us that Angry young men continue to be America’s greatest threat (and all this time I thought that Climate Change was America's greatest threat, haven't we been taught that?) Maureen goes on to blame America's latest Greatest Threat on "first-person shooter games, violent pornography, racism, and a fascination with guns and violence", and being a denizen of Gotham (a perfect nickname for NYC) she shows her liberal leftist union pin by blaming the whole thing on Donald Trump. But none of this is the root cause of this latest Greatest Threat.
Although I am relieved that Climate Change is no longer our Greatest Threat and I can go on to eat a farting cowburger without guilt, I am perplexed. If Donald John Trump, America's angriest president, is the cause of these latest shooting rampages, wouldn't Barack Hussein Obama, America's most incompetent president, be the cause of the 37 mass shootings that happened on his watch? He doesn't seem to care that all the Russian Collusion perpetrated by the Clinton campaign happened on his watch too.
I emailed Miss Maureen and asked her that exact question, and I urge any reader of this missive to do the same (her email link is in the article I have linked). Please be polite, liberals are having a very bad time, after all they have to admit that The Squad is all theirs and their 25 candidates are busy proving that political cannibalism may be their only hope.
Is Maureen correct that "first-person shooter games, violent pornography, racism, and a fascination with guns and violence" are responsible for violent shooters? Partially.
Of course when you play the game of Pin the Blame on the Elepahnt you may run into a speed trap of your own making. When the Never-Trumper antisemite Robert Gregory Bowers shot up the L'Simcha Congregation synagogue in the Pittsburgh area, the press was quick to blame Donald Trump without considering that being a Never-Trumper put Bowers in their corner of the ring. And as for antisemitism the left refuses to to acknowledge that the most audacious antisemites on earth are some of their idols: Squad members Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are both vile antisemites while left wing spokesnut Al Sharpton has engineered protests, boycotts, and riots, pitting African Americans against Jewish communities. Does the name "Crown Heights" ring a bell Mr. Resist_We_Much?
The cause of these shootings is due to something missing, something that Miss Maureen missed, or intentionally ignored.
One of the things missing is mental health care. The Unites States has turned it's back on providing adequate mental health care, especially for potentially violent sufferers of mental illness. The shooters of Gabby Giffords and the Aurora theater shooter were both victims of psychosis, and many other shooters are too, but it's difficult to determine because the American press will under report the shooters mental state because that information may not be revealed until long after the press has decided the cause (Toxic Masculinity, Middle-Class White Syndrome, or Donald Trump).
This is America! I can track the UPS delivery of my Software Defined Radio (the most fun you can have for under $30) on a live map, but we allow our government to ignore the plight of the sufferers and families of mental illness? I thought Obamacare was the end-all be-all cure-all!
But something else is missing, something so important that overlooking this missing ingredient is shocking to many of my readers. This something would have completely prevented these shootings if the shooter was capable of accepting that 'cure'.
The ingredient is, of course, Jesus. If the potential shooters were capable of accepting Jesus as their savior they will no longer be potential shooters. Jesus means joy, and hope, and serenity. There is no need for anger when the Holy Spirit fills our heart, and we always know where we can turn when anger threatens to overwhelm our heart. Worry, despair, sorrow, anger, these things constantly attack us and Jesus taught us that God is always there for us. When I lost my job and my future suddenly turned dark I turned in all directions looking for light, and there it was in Matthew:
25 “For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? 27 And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? (Matthew 6:25-27)
What a reminder! Nothing worldly helped me until Matthew's recollection of Christ's words came back to me. I'm not good, but I'm better, and if these words can calm the heart of a cast aside disabled veteran, maybe they can help a young man filled with anger. How many lives would have been saved if we, us Christians, could have reached out to these angry men.
But so many things are working against us, will the word of God reach past the depths psychosis? Unfortunately in the case I've seen the answer is no. But if psychosis is not the issue, other things are blocking God's word. So many disreputable people have turned the teaching of God's word into a prosperity clown act that legitimately teaching God's word is rejected by those whose hearts were hardened by false teachers. Also, reading from the bible on street corners is being considered a hate crime is some communities (as if I want to consider the post millennial UK a community). And then there's this:
But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised. (1 Corinthians 2:14 )
Which means that the word of God is meaningless to some people, and they are cut off from His forgiveness. When you look at John 3:16 knowing that some people cannot understand God's word John 3:16 has a much different feel to it:
For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.
It sounds so joyful, whoever believes in him has eternal life! But what happens if you don't believe in Jesus? I want to sit next to someone who holds up a John 3:16 sign at a football game and hold one that says John 3:18
He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
Sadly most of our shooters fall into the John 3:18 category, but we don't know for sure who's a 3:18 and who is a 3:16. What if we could have reached out before they got the bump stock for their AR-15? Could the words of love and peace reach through the anger and soothe that potential shooters heart? Maybe it did and the shooting never happened. Of course that never would have made the news, so this is something we should be sharing loud and often.
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