Tragedy in Charleston

Dear Editor:

Once again, America mourns another senseless and horrific case of mass murder. The massacre of nine Black people in a Charleston, S.C., church marks one more tragedy in a succession of mass killings that have ravaged America in recent years.

The mass killings have occurred in public schools, movie theatres, shopping malls, military installations, and now the last place you would think it could happen, inside a church building.

This heinous criminal act is extremely difficult to process and Americans up and down the land have a right to wonder why this is happening in a country we all dearly love?

Why and how is it that the taking of human life has become so frequent and so senseless in a nation that counts murder as being one of the very worst of all criminal acts?

As the nation searches for answers, there is no end to the philosophical and sometimes political rhetoric that always follows in the heels of these kinds of tragedies.

One of the first knee-jerk reactions is to blame it on guns. The anti-2nd Amendment people will clamor for more and stiffer gun laws. There is simply no way to write enough gun laws to stop someone who wants to commit murder. A person consumed with the insane desire to kill will use any weapon they can get their hands on.

The answer is not to be found in more gun controls. We are already over burdened with gun laws, and this is especially true in the liberal Northeastern USA.

What our politicians, educators, news media, and television anchors need to do is to ask the real hard questions.

Why has this country become accustomed to a culture of death? We have had state-endorsed murder of the unborn children in the U.S. since 1973.

During the past 42 years, America has tolerated the murder of 55 million unborn children, and many of them were full-term children. On the very day that nine people were senselessly murdered in Charleston, S.C., more than 3,000 unborn innocent defenseless children were murdered in abortion clinics throughout America. Where was the national outrage for these murders?

For many years television networks and the film industry in Hollywood have filled the screen with acts of violence and bloodshed. Children and youth grow up watching this violence and personalize this violence in simulated video games that glorify taking human life.

Add to this violence a nation that consumes enormous amounts of alcohol and drugs of every description and at the same time have no moral compass to guide them and you have a situation ripe for violence.

The major reason why the culture of death now stalks our land is because we have rejected the moral and biblical values that once held people accountable to God and each other for their behavior.

Far too many Americans have grown up without the biblical values that once characterized the American people.

The 1960s marked a sea change in the morals of America. America kicked God, prayer, and the Bible out of the public schools in 1962-63. The Ten Commandments were removed from our public schools and from the public square in America more than 20 years ago.

We are simply reaping what we have sown. We have put God out of our national life and God has simply reciprocated by removing His protection and blessing from our land.

We are now more than two generations removed from the moral values that once held us accountable to God and one another.

The solution to the tragedy in Charleston does not lie in more gun controls.

Neither the present nor the future will change until we acknowledge our national disconnect from God, the Bible, and all things that once made America the shining "City on a Hill."

Dan Gayman