Over the past few days, I have sat back and listened to my friends and the media opine about the causes and the remedy of the tragedy that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Ct. All agree that it was tragic, unnecessary, wasteful. I, personally, was shocked by the response of some who, while the events were still unfolding, were willing to judge others, or leverage this tragedy to emphasize a point, especially one which I have heard them advocate frequently. In effect saying, “See, this is why we need ______” where the blank was filled in with various solutions. Gun control, better mental health treatment, armed guards in schools, metal detectors, and on and on and on. Even more disturbing to me were the people on the right and left who were so quick to say that they hoped or wished that peoples hearts and minds should be equally moved to empathize with ____, where the blank might be filled with any cause for people to die needlessly, abortion, foreign wars perpetrated by our government, curable illness, etc. I felt that this was incredibly insensitive, and was shocked at how little empathy these people showed for the victims and their families.  I didn’t particularly care for your causes before, and now I could care even less, because you would use one tragedy to attempt to build a case for me to care about a different one. Even worse are those who claim that this tragedy is somehow a judgment for some sin, or claimed wrong that our society has perpetrated or permitted – whether that be gay marriage or violence in media and games or removing prayer from schools. Bunk and Hogwash.

Lets start at the core, shall we: we all fail to love our fellow man. That is where it breaks down. Maybe its about mental illness, and maybe the young man in this tragedy was damaged irreparably. Maybe nothing could have prevented this. But how many of these individuals just “didn’t fit in” and were ostracized because of their “strangeness”. Maybe they were the victim of simply not having anyone understand them, or even try.

So lets go back to judgment – my Bible says of judgment, “Let him who is without sin, cast the first stone.” and “All of us has gone astray, each of us has turned his own way…”. My reading of that is that none of us are in a position to judge. None of us. While we can read the Bible and understand what sin is, we are not to accuse our fellow man – that is not our role.

In my opinion, whatever factors contributed to this tragedy, availability of guns, the current state of mental health treatment, the safety of our schools – they are secondary to the mental anguish that is experienced by those who have been bereaved by this tragedy. The parents, relatives, fellow students and teachers, and members of the community at large are suffering. This includes the family of Adam Lanza.

My suggestion for us all is that before we look “out there” for a solution, we start by looking “in here”. In here is where the sin starts. In here is where our attitudes are corrupt. In here is where hate breeds and festers. In here is where each of us can actually make a difference. In here is where I can admit, to myself, that “there fore the grace of God, go I”. In here is where I can empathize with both victim and perpetrator, because I realize that under the right circumstances, I am not really that far away from being them. In here, I am forced to realize that we are all humans, more alike than we are different. In here, I see all my own flaws and character issues.

Jesus said this in Matthew 5:21-22

In this, he is saying that when we call someone a fool, or otherwise insult them, it is the result of something bad happening “in here”, that in our thinking “devalues” a person. It is this devaluation, ultimately, that allows us to come to a point where murder seems acceptable. It is this devaluation that lurks behind every genocide and every massacre and every murder. When we think or say that someone is useless, or worthless, what we are expressing is an attitude that is far away from the way God views us.

So here is my controversial political statement:  Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.  Our 2nd amendment right to bear arms, provides a means for arming a new revolution against any future tyranny, so whatever weaponry the tyrants can devise, we also can own.  An unborn fetus is a person whether his mother wants him or not.  Laws must be pragmatic, not a definition of absolute morality, unless there can be a 100% accurate adjudication process, anlong with an incorruptible basis for that definition. Good and evil both exist together in each of our hearts, and none of us is qualified to accurately discern one from the other in our own hearts, let alone that of another.  Our forefathers, the founders of this nation believed that we have (all of us) inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  It is inalienable because it was not given by our peers (mankind) but by our creator (who understands our purpose).  When we disavow that creator, we are disavowing the inalienability of those rights, subjecting them to the whims and fancies of human agency.  Within that human agency is both good and evil, virtue and vice, kindness and cruelty and without a creator, we have no authority beyond human will to determine one from the other.

I have a friend who said once, “Every one has a ‘better dead’ list. A list of people for whom the world would be a better place if they were dead. Most of us are just unwilling to admit it.” He’s right. We all do. If we want to solve this problem, we each need to clean up our list and teach our children that everyone, no matter how different from us, no matter how they behave, has value, and in God’s sight, exactly the same value as we do. So when we devalue them, we are disagreeing with God. In this regard, each of us is Adam Lanza.

How does that make you feel?