Who are we really angry at?

I worked dozens of crime scenes in my eleven year career as a Dallas police officer. I responded numerous times just as people were breathing their last breath. I have every deceased persons image in my head and I can go through them in chronological order. I could go back to every one of them and if I could draw express in exact detail everything as it was. Death burns a permanent place of the event into my mind. One of the crimes I never, ever had to be at was the murder of a child let alone twenty. Those images were one of the causes of my retirement from law enforcement, I pray that the departments working that nightmare have the programs and staff to be able to debrief and counsel those first responders. This is a war scene scenario. The kind that soldiers come home with seriously life hindering cases of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or shell shock as they called it back in the day. To those men and women I ask we send up our prayers because their lives have been changed forever.

A sick young adult went into a school and did the unimaginable. Though events like this have happened numerous times all over the planet, we neuro typicals cannot image taking up arms against defenceless women and children. As a father I can barely spank my kids without guilt and remorse. What type of damage or birth defect or evil could cause a human to cease being human and cause this kind of carnage. First, this is not about gun control. The killer could have as easily taken an ax to the door then set a classroom on fire but we are not going to make gasoline illegal if that were to occur. What this massacre is about is community. Your scratching your heads, I know. I say community because they had friends right? They had family, right. They had neighbors, right? Your telling me that someone, anyone, didn't have a suspicion that something was wrong with the shooter and his mother. Numerous news agencies are reporting that the mother was becoming a doomsday prepper. Making statements about the coming global demise.

The massing of weapons and storing of food. I am not saying that that type of preparation is not without it's value or unusual. What I am saying was the change and short time period in which the mother of the shooter began to prep should have had the community wondering why. Now his profile as a child and as a young adult and there were clear signs he was a person that should have been on someone's radar, but it seems he wasn't. Ultimately it was he that pulled the trigger and made the physical decisions to commit these evil acts. However, there is blame to go around. Parents, teachers, friends, neighbors we all failed him. In our world of social media and portable computing we have insulted and isolated ourselves. Rarely do we now engage those around us whether positively or negatively. Obama says we have to change. That's left speech for get rids of guns. You can confiscate every single gun from every single source you can think of and the next day there will still be murders and robberies and rapes and mayhem.

What we have to change is our human condition. We value nothing profound or ethereal. We thumb our noses at faith, call them forms of control. We fail to pause just to look within because we are so busy doing things to improve how we look to the outside. Arrogance, greed and selfishness are the values that are looked up to and striven for buy our species today. For some reason the opposite values are what help to calm us or keep our more animal impulses at bay. The guns, the guns, the guns, is what I keep hearing and seeing being posted and said worldwide. Dr. Keith Ablow was one of the first to call into question the mental health care that the shooter did or did not receive. What if, the shooter had from the moment he was noticed to be mentally different attention from the community. The kids mother or father doing everything they could possibly do. The schools being nosey and talking to him talking to his parents, never quiting or passing the buck. If he ever received counseling, the clinicians calling, checking, being proactive. The community failed the shooter, he failed himself, he killed.

Where do we go from here? What we need to do is focus on the whys and not the with whats. Doesn't that make more sense. Why was this individual created by our society? Hurts right. The shooter came from us. What is wrong with us, and who are we so angry at? Our culture spawned this tragedy. The elements for him to manifest the ills and demons inside him are partly the responsibility of the American way. Bob Costas said it was a gun culture that was to blame. Take the "Gun" away I say it's the culture. Broken homes, men just acting as studs procreating with anything and everything, then hitting the road. Violence viewed as cool and hip. For some as I heard the rapper The Game say on the Howard Stern show that when he was young going to jail was a badge of honor and manhood. For the love of the Lord it is not the gun laws that are broken world it is WE as individuals that are breaking. Let us as a nation and as a global society focus on ourselves first. Heal what has been breaking within our countries for decades now. Then you know what, after each of us has looked within. Get your noses out of your phone or tablet or laptop and look around. Have a human interaction, a look, a gesture, a conversation with someone around you. Let's be people again not cyborgs.