The danger faced by children at school in the US has become so great that teachers now carry guns to school. The decision to begin arming teachers came in response to one fateful morning on Friday the 14th December, 2012, when Adam Lanza forced his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, USA. Opening fire without remorse, he hunted down and slaughtered 20 small children between the ages of 5 and 10 years old. His first victim that day was his mother; he shot her in the face, then he drove her car to the school at which he himself was once a pupil, and in addition to the 20 children, murdered 6 teachers before finally killing himself. The next day, US President Obama admitted: “As a nation, we have endured far too many of these tragedies in the last few years.”
Indeed, mass murder in the US has become a regular occurrence. Five months before the Sandy Hook school massacre, James Holmes burst into a crowded cinema in Aurora, Colorado during a screening of the latest “Batman” film. Dressed as one of the characters in the film, he shot and killed 12 people at random. Three months before that, a former student at Oikos University in California opened fire killing 7 people; and two months before that, a former pupil of Chardon High School, Ohio, returned and opened fire on students; picking his targets randomly, he killed 3 and injured 6 others. The mass killings in the US keep on happening, and at the time of writing, funeral arrangements are being made for 6 random murder victims from an apartment building in Hialeah, Miami, who were murdered for no apparent reason.
The frequency of these killing episodes, and the death toll each time, is much higher in the US than it is in other Western countries, but this is related more to the ease of access that Americans have to automatic weapons than to any difference in the degree of alienation or anger felt by the murderers. For example, last month, July 2013, two multiple stabbings were reported in England (in the towns of Shipley and Brixton), each of which occurred for no apparent reason and resulted in the death of at least one person. In that same month, a 20 year conviction was given to Daniel Watkins who “stabbed two strangers in a random attack.”
While murders happen throughout the world, and murder is as old as human history, Western civilization is plagued by the phenomenon of murder without motive, and one has to wonder why. The Western ideology is hollow inside and fails to provide tranquillity or higher purpose. The societies formed upon Western concepts push religion far from societal life, leaving many people to feel lost. There are fewer places of worship to choose from as the years go by, while hobbies proliferate in abundance; recreation, vacations, material possessions and pleasures compete to fill the void. For many, life is a futile carnival of wandering from fad to film to fantasy in an unending search for meaning: for some, the frustration and failure become too much.
Dr. Abdullah Robin
01/08/2013