I am not going to go into a big blurb about Guns and violence and the causes of Gun crime as I am not really qualified to comment that much. I have a view about it most definitely. People kill people, Guns are just a tool. The easier it is to get the tool the more likely people will use it. You will never keep guns out of the hands of criminals, I am not naive enough to think gun control will achieve that. But maybe, just maybe, if that student had not been able to walk into a store and easily purchase a gun, this might have been avoided.
However, my main thoughts are sadness for both the victims and the perpetrator of the killings. Sure he will face judgment before God and most likely pay in eternity for the crime. However my immediate thoughts were what has to happen in a persons mind to get to the place where they calmly purchase a gun, then days later just start indiscriminately ending fellow human beings lives who they have been studying with the day before. I am sure many people think about killing someone else for some perceived crime against them, but what makes you go from that thought to stepping over that line where no ones life has any value to you. Was it pathological depression, where drugs may have helped. Was it psychological depression due to previous trauma's? We may never know. My prayers are with the families and friends of the victims, may God bring comfort and hope in the face of such an grief and loss.
What I do find interesting in these situations is how a situation like this, terrible and devastating though it is, is seen as more shocking than say the 170 people killed today in Iraq by indiscriminate, cowardly car bombs. We are so used to hearing about the daily bombs and rising death toll in Iraq that we seem to treat it as normal news now. Nothing out of the ordinary! What a statement that makes about us! Those being killed in Iraq are no different than those young students murdered in Virginia. They are human beings, going about their daily lives, struggling for normality in the face of such evil cowardly acts. Let us not become immune to the reports of lives lost anywhere in the world.
May we see those people as God sees them and weep for the world in which we live. I world lost in sin and wreaking of death. There is only one hope for all nations and people. The hope of salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ.
1 comment:
I stumbled across your blog looking for reviews from a Christian perspective of the new Rush album, then I saw this entry and wanted to comment.
I graduated from Virginia Tech in 1989 and now live and work in the Washington, DC area, so this tragedy captured my attention even though it did not touch me personally.
What I wanted to relate to you was a story told by Chris Garriott at our church concerning the mourning service held in the VT stadium shortly after the shootings. Chris runs a chapter of Reformed University Fellowship at the University of Maryland (http://www.um.ruf.org/) and felt called to attend the VT service.
According to Chris, the service was presided over by representatives from many faiths: Christian, Hindu, Muslim, etc. And in the politically correct tradition, there were no prayers and no mention of God. With such a cross-section of faiths it is no wonder, but still sad. Anyhow, Chris reported that at one point someone in the audience near the front stood up and started reciting the Lord's Prayer. He describes what followed as a wave, as people started joining in from front to back. He says that by the time the wave got to him they were on 'forgive us our debts'.
You can draw your own conclusions, but this event speaks to me about how God has not abandoned this world, nor will he be silenced. And it sometimes only takes one person to cause a sea change.
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