Bishop Arthur J. Serratelli

The Aug. 3rd mass shooting at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, took the lives of 22 people and left 24 others injured. The very next day, a gunman fired on people enjoying themselves in the Oregon Historic District of Dayton, Ohio. He killed nine people and injured 27 others.

In light of the mass shooting at the July 28th California Gilroy Garlic Festival, the May 31st Virginia Beach shooting, and the April 29th shooting at the University of North Carolina, the almost instantaneous succession of the El Paso and Dayton shootings has caused many Americans to question whether our country is getting more and more violent. And rightly so!

The images of our young being mowed down at Columbine High School, on the campus of Virginia Tech, at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and at Parkland’s Stoneman Douglas High School, still haunt us. The list of these senseless massacres can go on and on. As of the Aug. 31st Midland-Odessa, Texas shooting, 256 mass shootings across the United States have been reported. In this year alone so far, gun-related violence has claimed the lives of more than 8,700 people and injured more than 17,000 others.

However, gun-related violence is not the only threat to our safety. Child abuse, domestic violence, sexual violence, elder abuse and youth violence harm millions of Americans each year. And, amid all the soft sounding shibboleths of women’s health and women’s rights, there remains the horror of the violence done to children in the womb. Since 1972, the barbaric practice of abortion has destroyed the lives of more than 30 million unborn children.

From its birth, the soil of this great country has been drenched in blood. In claiming this land, some of the first explorers and colonists and their successors displaced and killed the native population. Then, in the violent struggle to win freedom for those enslaved, our nation nearly hemorrhaged to death during the Civil War. “Indeed, violence is part of our national mythology. We shed more blood settling our frontier than any other New World nation, and we made more movies glorifying the bloodshed” (Christopher Jencks, “Is Violent Crime Increasing?,” The American Prospect, Winter, 1991).

Violence in America is much higher than in Italy, Canada and Japan. More assaults. More robberies. More rapes. More murders. But this is nothing new. In fact, crime rates have always been much higher in America than in other affluent nations. The empty rhetoric of some politicians does nothing to make our country safer. It is all too easy to blame the gun and forget the person who pulls the trigger. Besides, technology has given would-be criminals an arsenal of weapons to inflict harm such as explosive devices and chemicals.

Some would have us believe that the violence is spawned by poverty, poor education or unstable family life. These certainly create a toxic environment that can breed violence. Ultimately, violence finds its fundamental source in the human heart that forgets God. The first act of violence took place outside the Garden of Eden. Cain, like his parents, pushed God’s will out of his decision-making and then killed his brother Abel. Cain, thus, introduced violence into the human family. Lamech, a descendant of Cain, magnified the violence. In his Song of the Sword, he boasted, “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for bruising me. If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times” (Gn 4:23-24).

Sacred Scripture teaches, “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Prv 29:18). It is our vision that determines how we look at the world and each other. The Hebrew word for vision, hazon, actually carries with it the idea of God touching the human heart, God revealing his will to the human person, God giving us vision. Thus, the proverb is saying, without this contact between the person and God, without a vision of God’s will, people “perish.” Here the Hebrew is very graphic. The Hebrew word para’ (perish) actually means “run wild” or “cast off all restraint.” And so, when God is not a part of a person’s life or a society’s culture, people feel free to do as they please and the result is more violence.

In our ever-secularizing culture, even the mention of God is routinely banished from the public forum. Laws, such as physician-assisted suicide, are passed without reference to the vision that comes from God’s will for our welfare. Yet, this should not make us despair. Like the beautiful plum blossom that flowers even in the most adverse circumstance of ice and snow, a heart that is open to God is not tainted by an adverse environment and can bring peace into the world.