In a culture where nearly one fourth of the population is functionally illiterate, it may be a tall order to expect people to begin to understand mathematics. However what has been passing for news this week requires a bit of soul searching and perhaps a deeper understanding of what has actually taken place. I want to start by saying that it is a tragedy when twenty children are gunned down. It is terrible and sad that anyone feels the need to kill off their family, teachers and students. We can rest assured that these sorts of attacks are not new and that although extremely rare, they will become more common as greater numbers of people are forced to live under greater and greater stress. This is not to say that there are probably some things we can do to help, but Lord and Lady bless those who think that any one measure would stop these sorts of attacks. Human beings have proven to be resourceful even when they are crazy.
Right off the top, I have to say that the society that we live in has serious power and control issues. In the case of the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting, we do not have power over the forces of insanity, nor can we control weapons that have made their way into the hands of unstable individuals. Many feel that their guns are tools that are for protection. I took the time to look into how guns "make us safer" and found that, in fact, gun owners are four times more likely to be killed with a firearm than unarmed individuals. Even in our relatively small town of 100,000 souls, there have been multiple events in which ostensibly "trained" gunmen (police) have unloaded multiple weapons in the heat of the moment and twenty, thirty, forty rounds later, perhaps one round hit it's mark. We have even had incidents in which innocent bystanders were killed, but the suspect who was being fired upon was barely injured. I'm hoping that we would consider the police a sort of well-organized militia but just because someone straps iron to their belt each day cannot make anyone safer when the lead starts to fly.
That said, there are over four thousand children who die each and every day because of filthy water. I do not want to sound one bit callous or unfeeling. In fact, it is the opposite. Perhaps I care too much. as the daily death toll mounts, we have to understand that these are orders of magnitude greater tragedies than the twenty odd individuals who died in this most recent shooting. One order of magnitude greater tragedy would be 260, two orders of magnitude would be 2,600. Hmmmmm, still, we are barely half of the daily death rate from dirty water. To get our minds around the numbers, perhaps we should think about the number of children who die each month from contaminated water...120,000. We could add on a third order of magnitude to the school shootings and we would be at 26,000 and the number of dead children would still be less than a quarter of the monthly death rate from an absolutely, 100% preventable cause of death.
I don't know if we will ever be able to fathom or correct the sort of self-loathing that is required to "cure" the particular sort of mental illness that leads people to kill innocent individuals. I don't know if we will ever decide as a culture that human life is worth caring for. I do know that what the news coverage has done is to terrorize us further and keep the truth of far worse crimes against humanity out of the news and off our airwaves. I also know that without perspective, the world is just an ever-changing kaleidoscope of colorful patterns, sans meaning, sans relationship to reality, sans understanding.
Right off the top, I have to say that the society that we live in has serious power and control issues. In the case of the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting, we do not have power over the forces of insanity, nor can we control weapons that have made their way into the hands of unstable individuals. Many feel that their guns are tools that are for protection. I took the time to look into how guns "make us safer" and found that, in fact, gun owners are four times more likely to be killed with a firearm than unarmed individuals. Even in our relatively small town of 100,000 souls, there have been multiple events in which ostensibly "trained" gunmen (police) have unloaded multiple weapons in the heat of the moment and twenty, thirty, forty rounds later, perhaps one round hit it's mark. We have even had incidents in which innocent bystanders were killed, but the suspect who was being fired upon was barely injured. I'm hoping that we would consider the police a sort of well-organized militia but just because someone straps iron to their belt each day cannot make anyone safer when the lead starts to fly.
That said, there are over four thousand children who die each and every day because of filthy water. I do not want to sound one bit callous or unfeeling. In fact, it is the opposite. Perhaps I care too much. as the daily death toll mounts, we have to understand that these are orders of magnitude greater tragedies than the twenty odd individuals who died in this most recent shooting. One order of magnitude greater tragedy would be 260, two orders of magnitude would be 2,600. Hmmmmm, still, we are barely half of the daily death rate from dirty water. To get our minds around the numbers, perhaps we should think about the number of children who die each month from contaminated water...120,000. We could add on a third order of magnitude to the school shootings and we would be at 26,000 and the number of dead children would still be less than a quarter of the monthly death rate from an absolutely, 100% preventable cause of death.
I don't know if we will ever be able to fathom or correct the sort of self-loathing that is required to "cure" the particular sort of mental illness that leads people to kill innocent individuals. I don't know if we will ever decide as a culture that human life is worth caring for. I do know that what the news coverage has done is to terrorize us further and keep the truth of far worse crimes against humanity out of the news and off our airwaves. I also know that without perspective, the world is just an ever-changing kaleidoscope of colorful patterns, sans meaning, sans relationship to reality, sans understanding.
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