Social media sites and the news are blasted with the tragic story out of Santa Barbara. Our country has endured another senseless slaughter of six innocent people by a lone gunman who decided that others should die that day. Some of his victims knew him and others only saw him for a split second as he carelessly fired a semi-automatic weapon instantly killing complete strangers and changing the lives of their families and friends forever.

The news is mostly focused on gun control. It always is when these things happen. For a couple of weeks, the two opposing sides are going to fight about gun control and background checks and then the conversation will eventually quiet down until it is mostly gone again – until the next shooting. And so it goes. A horrific problem in our country and we all know that nothing is going to change at all. We only get really upset right when the shootings occur but nobody seems to want to discuss real solutions.

When I first hear about these shootings, my mind automatically goes to a young man in his early 20’s. I don’t even have to wait for them to identify the shooter. There is a long list growing of teenage boys and men in their young 20’s tied to these rampages, and we can’t solve anything if we are only going to focus on the guns. We have to look so much further into how our society has evolved and also closely examine the lives of each shooter. The Santa Barbara killer had recorded videos of himself discussing why he was going to slaughter his victims. He had a deep hatred towards women whom he felt had shunned him throughout his life. Although just two of his victims were women, his idea about relationships revolved heavily around sex and not companionship, and domination instead of partnership.

Most people would agree that these killers are all mentally ill. They are suffering from something most of us can’t understand but when we throw them into today’s modern technology and parenting style, we have to wonder how we can possibly stop these crimes. Children are being handed electronic devices from the age of two and most of them have access to the internet. The ability to seek out inappropriate information is far too easy no matter how many blocks parents use. Most parents start taking their children to violent movies before they even start kindergarten with the misperception that children can distinguish fantasy from reality (even though they still believe in Santa Clause). By the time boys are in elementary school, most of them are playing violent video games for hours each day and the action looks real. They are accustomed to seeing so much death and destruction that by the time they reach high school, they are numb to the reality of what they are seeing on the screen. The ability to gain access to pornography is simple and it’s almost impossible for parents to stop. This isn’t just an old Playboy magazine to look at but rather graphic and sometimes violent acts that children can watch with a simple Google search.
None of us know if our children will suffer from mental illness when they are older, but from the moment they are born, we have to protect them from ever ending up on the trigger side of these guns. We have to start by keeping electronics out of their hands at young ages so that they don’t develop an addiction to the technology. This requires active parenting and not having an easy out by placing an iPad in front of your kid every time they are bored. We have to stand strong and keep their television and movie viewing age appropriate until they are long past the age of believing in the Tooth Fairy or the Easter bunny. We have to resist giving them fancy phones with internet access that will allow them to look at anything they are curious about when they are too young to understand love and companionship versus sex and pornography. We have to be the one parent who won’t allow our middle school aged son to play violent video games no matter how many times they ask for it.

If your child does end up with some type of mental illness or is the victim of bullying, don’t you feel like they have a better shot at getting through it if they have had limitations to what they are seeing and feeling at these younger ages? Every shooter in the past few years had a history of spending hours on violent games and of course had access to guns. As for those guns, I was fortunate to be raised in a home that didn’t even allow cap guns. My children have been raised in the same fashion. We have been anti-violence and it has worked for us. I understand people want to own guns for protection or for hunting, but I don’t believe anybody can make a strong argument for why a 22 year old male needs three semi-automatic handguns in his possession. Something is wrong with our society when that is right. The guns are often compared to cars and the argument is made that the car doesn’t kill someone in an accident just like the gun isn’t responsible for the murder. For those that like that analogy, take a look at what a teenager has to go through to earn the right to operate a car and compare it to what an individual has to go through to hold a lethal weapon in their hand. This isn’t the weapon that existed when the 2nd amendment was passed – this is a gun with a magazine capable of mowing down an entire sidewalk of people in seconds. We all have to accept that rapidly changing technology requires new discipline and possibly updating the rules whether we are referring to guns, computers, cell phones or social media.

With the violent media that is so easily accessed in our country, we need to do more to protect our children from being on either side of that weapon. We have to work to prevent a violent mindset throughout their lives and then come to the table united to talk about what type of weapons really should be available for daily use. We have to discuss the real problems before we will ever find any solutions. Right now, we have six more families going through unfathomable grief and a seventh family that is left feeling loss, grief, despair, and guilt trying to figure out how they could have prevented what happened. All I am hearing is blame and all I am seeing is finger pointing at certain groups when the reality is that this problem starts the moment a child is born. We all are partly responsible for what happened in Santa Barbara and what will happen again in some other city far too soon. We can’t stop all of these crimes from occurring, but we can start talking about how to reduce them one by one.