Another Mass Shooting: the Left Uses Tragedy and Students to Ignore a Culture of Death

National Public Radio (NPR), a taxpayer supported news organization, is reporting, in all seriousness, that “students” in Florida are organizing big, national events to demand more gun control and protection against mass shooters.

In addition to holding a rally and speaking out in news interviews and on social media since last week’s shooting, students are organizing a nationwide walkout of students as a call to action on April 20, the 19th anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.

I have no doubt that students and their families are devastated, frightened and angry. And that they are on social media talking about this is no surprise.

But for a national “news” organization to report, without qualification, that high schoolers, just days after this terrible attack, while burying their classmates, have the resources and know-how to plan anything much more than how to get through the day, is just not credible.

Wouldn’t it be more honest to report who is actually planning, financing and marketing these events? Say, for example, Democratic party operatives and their vast network of social organizers and disrupters who are using these students and this tragedy for political gain? But that would not fit the political narrative NPR likes to spin following these wrenching events.

Fortunately, someone with a bigger audience than NPR is thinking about why these mass shootings keep happening.

Peggy Noonan’s column in The Wall Street Journal this weekend was entitled, “The Parkland Massacre and the Air We Breathe. What’s gone wrong with our culture that produces such atrocities? It’s a very long list.”

Noonan said we must look at the culture, and specifically the culture of death in America. That is a conversation that we cannot have if we are screaming at one another about gun control.

A way to look at the question is: What has happened the past 40 years or so to produce a society so ill at ease with itself, so prone to violence?

Imagine you are pregnant, in the last trimester, and suddenly feel movement in your belly, a shift from here to there. You say, “Oh my God, feel,” and you take the hand of the father, or of another intimate, and you place it on your stomach. You don’t say, “The fetus lurched,” or “A conglomeration of cells is making itself manifest.” You say, “The baby moved. The baby’s moving.” You say this because it is a baby, and you know it. You say it because in your wonder at it, and at life, you tell the truth.

I should add who used that example with me. A great liberal journalist who sees right through his party’s dishonesty on this issue.

The failure to ban late-term abortion is one of those central things we rarely talk about.

And I’ll tell you what I think a teenager absorbs about it, unconsciously, in America. He sees a headline online, he passes a television in an airport, he hears the quick story and he thinks: “If the baby we don’t let live is unimportant, then I guess I am unimportant. And you’re unimportant too.” They don’t even know they’re breathing that in. But it’s there, in the atmosphere, and they’re breathing it in. And it doesn’t make you healthier.

When you add in violent video games and movies, porn, social media—and mix it with the breakdown of our families and faith-based communities, you get too many young men who are alienated and dangerous.

This shooter did not keep his intentions a secret—he was signaling loud and clear what he planned to do. Adults all around him knew he was alienated and dangerous. The FBI even knew.

Why did this happen? What does this say about our culture and laws?

Unfortunately, even though Noonan roundly criticized the predictable default of our media and politicians to focus on controlling guns instead of controlling the people who use them to murder, she starts down the slippery slope, too, in hopes of swapping a ban of AR-15’s with a ban on late-term abortions. I understand her willingness to make that deal.

I think, however, figuring out why the adults in a position of authority either did not or could not stop this young man, and Noonan’s call to examine and reject the culture of death, is a more productive approach. It’s too bad the mainstream media and NPR make us shout to be heard.

[Photo from US News]