Laura Bramble
THE RED MENACE
You see some stories in the news that just make you say, "What the heck is going on in this world?" I saw two of these today, and it made me wonder about man's inhumanity to man.
I read about the two mass shooting cases that took place in the last two days. One was in Alabama, where a man shot and killed nine people after setting his mother and her house on fire, before turning the gun on himself and fatally firing. Of those nine people, six were family and family friends, including the killer's 74 year old grandmother. Of those friends, one was an 18 month old child visiting with her mother, who was also killed. The toddler's 4 month old sister is currently hospitalized in serious condition with a gunshot wound to the leg. The other three were just innocent bystanders that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. If that wasn't enough, a 19 year old boy in southern Germany randomly shot and killed 15 children before shooting and killing himself in a massacre at a high school. With both of these cases, no one is really sure why. These people were not walking around with a history of incarceration or mental disorders. They functioned normally in society. In fact, the man in Alabama had been accepted into the police and had done academy training.
Are these just random anomalies? Are they a representative occurrence? Was this always happening, but until the era of 24/7 news we just never heard about it? What could justify these acts in the minds of these killers? Does life and family mean so very little to these people? How many others out there are just like them, who feel the same way they do?
You have to look at this and wonder, do the actions of society create these situations or do society's acts get affected by these horrific acts of violence? I don't think we have the ability to be truly shocked anymore by events such as these, certainly not in the way we should. What does it say about us if we are not? We live in an era where hope- in ourselves, in each other, in the future- is needed now as much as ever. If mankind is capable of such cold blooded and senseless killings, what chance does hope have?
What the heck?
Laura Bramble
Political Simpleton
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