Underlying Causes of Mass Shootings in America

By David Ware

May 25, 2022

I attended public schools in four states between 1955 and 1967. Some were in small towns in Oklahoma, Oregon and Missouri. Some were in the big city of Los Angeles, California. Never once did I fear for my life when I stepped on campus.

I will not say there were not any mass shootings during those first 18 years of my life. Perhaps there were. But it never came to my awareness. For those of you too young to remember, the 1960’s were far from idyllic. They were the Psychedelic 60’s. It was a time of political turmoil and turbulence. There were tragic assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But these were all targeted killings, not random.

Something has happened in the last 55 years where people now have such spiritual emptiness and such misdirected hatred that they want to harm or kill people they don’t even know. Recently there have been two mass shootings by 18-year-olds. The one in Buffalo, New York was in a supermarket. The one in Uvalde, Texas was in an elementary school. We’re still waiting to hear whether the shooter in Texas had any specific people that he was targeting. But even if he did, the mass carnage reveals that this was not just directed only at specific persons.

I have always been one to get to the bottom line immediately. I don’t want to just know what happened but why it happened. The only way we can prevent it from happening again … or at least to protect ourselves and our loved ones … is to be able to understand and to predict when and where it might happen again.

Empathy is being able to put yourself in another person’s place and see things from their perspective. That is one factor that was lacking in both Buffalo and Uvalde. The shooters didn’t really know or care who their victims were or who would grieve their murders. They only thought about what they wanted to do without remorse.

As I see it, there are two directions that we need to take our focus.

One is to understand who might do such atrocities in the future and to anticipate and prevent them. The other is to be able to take due precautions to protect ourselves, our families, our friends and society in general for that matter.

Then we will discuss the mentality behind such indiscriminate killings.

First about the shooters. Why didn’t anybody see the warning signs? This is not to ascribe blame or guilt on anyone because enough people are suffering already. We just don’t understand human nature and motivations well enough to be able to know what another person might do. Even if we do know what another person might do, then we have civil liberties issues about what measures can be taken to prevent them from doing so. We have to preclude misidentifying innocent people.

Then there is the issue of being able to move freely, to go where we want and do what we please without fear. I fully support the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. But nobody, perhaps not even in Texas, would suggest that their Elementary School child should carry a weapon for their own protection. They need to have a secure environment provided by adults. Sometimes the perpetrator may also be a juvenile, sometimes not. But we still need to provide a safe environment for our children and grandchildren.

Nobody should have to worry that when you kiss your son or daughter goodbye in the morning when they leave for school, that may be the last time you will see them alive. Nobody should make a grocery run to the market and fear that they might never make it home again. These tragedies happen in blue States like New York and red States like Texas. Yes, they even happened in 1999 here in Hawaii with the Xerox shootings. This state has very strict gun control. Guns don’t pull their own trigger. People do.

Even if you exercise your constitutional right and are armed, you can’t really be alert every second. If you’re looking at the price of a box of cereal on a supermarket shelf, are you consciously thinking that somebody might come in with a weapon and try to murder you? If you do anticipate that, consider that the supermarket guard lost his life valiantly trying to stop the perpetrator, but the killer was wearing body armor. If you were carrying your own weapon in the supermarket, you wouldn’t have been able to stop him either.

What could have been done at the school in Texas? Do we have to put high fences around every schoolyard? Do we have to have metal detectors for everyone, both students and faculty as well as visitors? Do we have to have multiple security layers in place? At what point does protecting ourselves become so burdensome that we can’t live freely without experiencing paranoia every moment of our lives? These are serious questions.

Yes, in retrospect, those who lost friends and loved ones in the supermarket in Buffalo and the school in Texas would say, yes, more should have been done. But how do you anticipate where it will happen next and fortify that location? Does every business, educational institution and church in America have to become an armed fortress?

Let’s also consider for a moment the attack on the Taiwanese church in Orange County, California. It was one brave doctor who charged the gunman and sacrificed his own life that enabled others to take him down and tie him up. Quick thinking and altruism were key factors in preventing that event from being much more horrendous than it was.

So where does that leave us? We cannot get inside everybody’s head and predict when they’re going to kill somebody. We can’t be alert 100% of the time to defend ourselves. What do we do to change this trajectory into oblivion on which America is most definitely headed?

I asked myself what is so different in 2022 from 1967 when I graduated from high school? There have always been evil people. But the first mass school shooting that I remember was in Jonesboro, Arkansas in 1998. There may have been others before that, but that’s the first one that I recall. Then Columbine in Colorado the following year. Now these atrocities are happening all the time.

One common factor is that the murderers target classes of people rather than individuals. It appears that Buffalo was racially motivated. Orange County was politically motivated. We still don’t know yet with the tragedy in Uvalde. But, even more basic is the fact that in our world today, those who disagree with others are unwilling to just say let’s respectfully agree to disagree. They don’t want to just live and let live. If they don’t like you and they disagree with you, they don’t want just to defeat you, they want to hurt you or destroy you. Sometimes they do that politically and sometimes literally.

But we still have not really answered the question: Why? The problem is spiritual. There is a gaping void in most people where their heart should be. Yes, of course, they have that blood pump but they do not have a heart for the well-being of others.

Many people lack a sense of meaning, purpose and direction in their boring, empty lives. Some seek infamy, notoriety and ignominy over anonymity as a lasting reminder for the world that they ever existed. Some possess a blinding hatred of others whom they blame and scapegoat for their own shortcomings in life. Personal accountability for their own actions has never been instilled in them to become part of their psyche. They choose to lash out at others rather than go quietly into that dark night.

We could speculate or pontificate, but I will not go that route. What it all comes down to is that when we tell Almighty God that He is unwelcome in our society, we should not be surprised at the consequences of a Godless society that does not recognize any Higher Authority of right versus wrong.

I could conclude it with that, but there is one underlying factor that we absolutely have to address immediately. Are the mass shootings simply random, caused by empty-hearted, spiritually devoid, individuals or is there some coordinated scheme or design behind all of this?

Ask yourself who it is that wants to destroy American society, both as a concept and the human beings who comprise our society.

We can see that if Joe Biden and the current administration were trying to demolish our culture and our people, they could scarcely be any more successful than what is happening now. But to attribute to them the brain power to be able to implement this Blitzkrieg attack on our everyday lives would be to give them more credit than they are due.

Ultimately, it is Lucifer, the deceiver, the evil one who motivates this. But he uses earthly minions to accomplish his assault on God’s creation. I’m not going to give you a litany of the usual culprits because you probably already know. I’m more concerned about our response than I am about pursuing foreign enemies that are suborning our own families, friends, neighbors and government officials.

There are two possible scenarios that we need to understand. One is that specific individuals are facilitated, sometimes even induced, to commit these atrocities. In Buffalo, Orange County and Uvalde, that is for law enforcement to determine. But for We the People, we need to do something about the environment that is being created which is so conducive to the total breakdown of law and order and which puts our everyday lives in jeopardy.

Yes, as I said when I was in public school between 1955 and 1967, there were certainly evil people who could and would have done such things, but for some reason we didn’t wake up every day to hear about a new mass shooting. It’s time for Congress to get their priorities straight and start focusing inward on the unraveling of the moral fabric of our American society. The problem is they can’t do anything about it because their own moral fabric is already ripped into shreds.

That means that We the People need to elect better surrogates in the future. Those we have now are failing us miserably by perpetuating their own craving for power and wealth.

That is a consideration of the long-term solution. In the short-term, it will help if we develop eyes in the back of our heads. We never know what may be gaining on us. We never know when some innocent everyday activity like going to the supermarket or sending our kids to school may result in an unfathomable, unmitigated tragedy.

I ask you, my fellow Americans, is this any way to live? This great American experiment in liberty which has lasted for two and a half centuries is on its deathbed. Until we invite Jesus Christ back into our midst, we will continue to be our own worst enemies.