I hate to go to shopping malls, so any excuse not to go is good enough for me, even at Christmas time. The recent shooting spree at the mall in
OK. I realize my macabre sensibilities won’t go over well with some, so let’s look at this situation another way.
Immediately after this event, callers to a radio show proclaimed that mall doors should be outfitted with metal detectors. But then a later caller asked; what about the parking lots? If someone wanted to take out a lot of people at once, that would be a fine place, too. Heck, I’ve had moments where having a gun to deal with a parking space thief could have felt really right! OK, so why don’t we have searches of cars/persons as they arrive to a mall?
Obviously all these “fixes” lead to the absurd. There is no place that is perfectly safe. As in so many situations, then, the better question would be to return to the source, that is, to the reason why someone felt his only recourse was to shoot and kill others.
Hope is the antidote to the hopelessness that leads people to such desperate actions. We must be able to imagine a world where no one would feel so isolated that he/she had no other way to deal with pain but to hurt others. Just like the shooter at Virginia Tech, it is clear this young man had problems, but there was no one close enough to reach him, no one to hold out a hopeful hand to him.
When I look at scripture, and see what Jesus did for/with others, it seems clear that in so many cases he was, in essence, defusing people with love. His willingness to hear people’s needs and help them turn their lives around no doubt took away so much anger carried by those with physical or emotional difficulties, or those who had been marginalized by society. They were then able to face the world empowered by hope. He taught a way where love could overcome hate and peace overcome violence, whereas the reverse has never been and will never be possible.
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