This is an opinion piece that I'm just putting together very quickly. I won't be arguing any points with anyone after the final word of this post.
With the tragedy that took place last Friday the country is rightfully in shock. It is difficult to maintain a positive state of mind. People should be mourning and be emotional at this time; but this should not leak into the political sphere. Now is when politicians need to avoid making political moves that are affected by emotional states or emotional pressures from the public. There are two very different outcries that are coming from the post-Sandy Hook world: gun control and the oft asked question, "Where was God?".
First, the connection that people make from a shooting to gun control is an obvious and understandable one. It does not stop these things from happening though. September 11th, the greatest attack on American soil in our history, was not perpetrated with guns. The Oklahoma City bombing did not use guns. In the United Kingdom and Ireland a masked conflict has taken place for many decades where guns are supposed to be illegal. Criminals will commit crimes. Guns will be owned by those people that wish to own them, and will be used by those that wish to use them. The large majority of gun owners do not commit crimes. When does a few's crimes become cause to take away others' freedoms? It is simply politicians using people's emotional states to further their cause. Perhaps there should be more emphasis on the man that committed the crime, not the inanimate object he chose to use, in the investigation. My family does not own guns, and I do not plan to ever own a gun, but it is our choice and I can provide a guarantee that owning one would not cause any one of us to hurt another person with it.
The second idea that I've seen popping up in the response to Friday's tragedy is people asking, "Where is God?" I believe that God was right where he was supposed to be, in people's private lives. There are links to videos such as Mike Huckabee's
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR39j1KMOsE
He points out that we have pushed God from schools and public places over the years. Yes, we have...and yes, we were right in doing so. I agree wholeheartedly that the goodness of people showed up in all of the ways that Huckabee mentions, and if people wish to believe that that is God coming through then they should do so. To me it is people being raised to be kind and morally good, which does not require religion to do. Also, it does not specifically mean the Christian God either. There is no evil god, as all faiths have similar moral teachings. I am glad that he points out that it is not the lack of God being taught in school or that homosexuals are allowed rights that caused the shooting to occur; that can be left to the nutjob Phelps family to conclude.
All of this comes from an antiquated notion that the United States was founded as a Protestant state and that we have become godless over time. This is factually inaccurate in every way. While we were and still are majority Protestant Christian statistically, we have never been a Christian state. The founders made very clear their attempts to rid the government of religious overtones (which they failed in doing as we can see in our Pledge of Allegiance and on our money). Many of them were not traditional Christians themselves, being deists and pragmatic agnostics. Religion was something that was to be studied in one's own private life, and maintained privately. We are a diverse state, and if people want to create private schools that teach Christianity, Islam, or any of the rest then they absolutely should. Public schools, government buildings, and the like should not lean towards any one religion. In a democracy majority rules; and while for now the majority are Christian Protestants it does not allow us to ignore the minorities' religions in favor of creating an institutional leaning.
It is up to parents at home to raise children to grow up to be good, stable individuals in the way they see fit. We should stop blaming guns for the actions of people, and we should stop looking to the public system for moral direction by the use of religion. It is not the government's job to choose these things for us, it is ours. Don't let a terrible event give rise justifications for freedoms being taken away, and a prejudice in government. It is time to be heartbroken and come together, but politicians cannot let this time affect their judgment in allowing our state to veer even further from the values in mind when it was created.
