There's a number of things I found interesting with this clip, namely that it encapsulates a number of expected responses to a nightmare such as the one that transpired on December 14th. First, the question attributed to Neil Cavuto... where was God in all of this? How could God let such violence occur, especially to children? Mike Huckabee made a somewhat expected response when he mentioned how we push God out of our public life and then ask where did He go when something unimaginable happens.
Obviously Huckabee wasn't claiming that if we had prayer in school none of this would have happened, but then he goes on to state, in very different words, that when we set out to create a society that tries to accommodate vast differences in personal beliefs, well then we shouldn't be surprised when those efforts invariably lead to pure evil. Essentially he states that we allow evil in various forms to run our society... calling The Gays normal, having abortion pills, trying to maintain the separation of church and state called for by the founding fathers (maybe to a ridiculous degree in some cases). By doing that, and by denying moral absolutes (I guess the particular moral absolutes that a subset of people who agree with Huckabee subscribe to which doesn't an absolute make), we create a godless environment with the potential to create an Adam Lanza.
First I'd like to congratulate Mike Huckabee for not addressing a single issue that can be directly connected to the shooting in Newtown. This will probably come up later on.
Second, I guess I'll throw my own thoughts out here on these lines of thinking, and these thoughts should be taken with a ten-pound grain of salt.
I'm a spiritual person and I believe in God. When tragedies such as Newtown happen and people ask how God could let this happen, I often think about one of the earliest stories in the Old Testament... Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden eating an apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The story I grew up with had Adam and Eve forbidden from eating from this specific tree. Eve, pushed by a snake, eats first and disobeys God. Then Eve pushes Adam to do the same. That original sin dooms human kind to death and suffering.
Taking that story literally, God didn't protect all of humanity from our original sin, he gave us a choice and we chose poorly. Taken less literally, I think the story of original sin drives home the importance of free will and accepting responsibility for our actions even in the presence of an omnipotent God. For me, the story of original sin means that God isn't there to be used as some easy outlet of blame or source of abandoment in the worst of times. God didn't stop Adam and Eve from making their choice and he held Adam and Eve responsible for what they did. God isn't going to stop the next Adam Lanza from commiting whatever atrocity that occurs, and we need to hold ourselves responsible as a collective for events like Newtown.
There are other stories, such as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego getting thrown into ovens to burn to death only to have God protect them and keep them unharmed, but I feel like some of these other stories aren't so focused on the free will of human beings like those concerning Adam and Eve.
But I completely agree with Mike Huckabee that you can answer the question "Where was God?" by looking at the first responders, those trying to comfort the community and specifically the families of those lost. More specifically you can answer that question by looking at the fallen staff members who selflessly gave themselves out of love for the children in their care. Some charged the gunman, others cradled children and tried to shield them from gunfire. I also personally believe you can find God in the faces of the children that died and in the faces of children everywhere. You can find God in the words President Obama spoke to help ease Newtown's suffering, his address at the interfaith service on the Sunday after the shooting was inspirational and moving.
In the end, though, asking "Where was God..." feels more like a distraction after the initial shock wears off. Horrors such as these feel random at the time, but they really aren't. There's a series of events and decisions that led to that moment. Adam Lanza suffered from mental illness, his mother Nancy was a proud gun collector - wait, let's just stop right there and let that part of the puzzle fall into place for a moment. Just after the Newtown shooting, the following article made the rounds:
I thought it was an interesting, moving, heartbreaking peak into what some families in our country have to deal with and the societal shortfalls they encounter. But let me tell you exactly why the author of the above article is not Adam Lanza's mother... she doesn't collect guns while raising her child suffering from mental illness. I'm not trying to over-simplify what happened in Newtown or single out Nancy Lanza, but it does seem like a combination to be avoided.
Then there was this gem of an article over at The Daily Beast:
First, nothing like a "throw in the towel" headline in the wake of a tragedy, but let's talk a bit about the content. Here's a collection of quotes from the top of the article:
The things that would work are impractical and unconstitutional. The things we can do won't work.
There just aren't good words to talk about Newtown. It is a crime that literally defies imagination--hell, it flings imagination down and dances upon its head. No one reading this can imagine strolling into an elementary school and opening fire on a bunch of small children. You can't imagine even wanting to.
When one tries to picture the mind that plans it, one quickly comes to a dead end. Even if I had been raised with no moral laws at all, even if there were no cops and no prisons, I'm pretty sure that I still wouldn't want to spend a crisp Friday morning shooting cowering children. Trying to climb this mountain of wickedness is like trying to climb a glass wall with your bare hands. What happened there is pure evil, and evil, unlike common badness, gives an ordinary mind no foothold. Since we can't understand it, we can't change it. And since we can't change it, our best hope is to box it in.Right off the bat, I feel like Megan McArdle, the article's author, is working from a flawed premise. Maybe some of the solutions we might attempt are impractical, but so are a lot of things governments take care of... that's why they are handled by the public and not by private market forces. Maybe you could argue banning some kinds of weapons is unconstitutional, but the constitution isn't fixed. If we, as a society, deem it important enough to answer the assault weapon question once and for all, we can do that at the constitutional level. Not saying an amendment is realistic or practical either, but I can't see caving just because of the reasons laid out in that very first sentence above.
Then Ms. McArdle seems to confuse empathy with understanding in the second passage. She's absolutely right, I literally can not imagine what must be going through someone's mind when they decide to murder a child. But we, as a society, don't need to in order to understand Adam Lanza's illnesses better or the shortcomings in our mental health system that Nancy Lanza may have faced.
Finally, in the third passage, she seems to mix up her nature versus nurture. Adam Lanza suffered from a physical illness, and no comparison to someone raised in a lawless dystopia is going to clarify that point.
Ms. McArdle states a little further into the article that "Not every problem has a policy solution." I agree, and so does President Obama when he clearly said in his first remarks about the shooting that no single policy is going to solve massacres. The driving force of his response though, was we have to try to find solutions that at least make events like Newtown less likely.
It might be more tricky on some levels in this particular case, but I agree we should try. As the article rightly points out, the Lanza's had money and lived in an affluent part of the country. The school system had, probably, more resources than most to try to help kids like Adam Lanza growing up. But Lanza wasn't in the public school system anymore, so why can't a first step be to look into what we do for these troubled kids as they finish growing up? As the article states:
Adam Lanza, the apparent shooter, had some sort of moderately severe autism-spectrum disorder. Over the years, like many parents of special needs children, his mother seems to have increasingly withdrawn from work and the community in order to focus on taking care of her son.So we have a single Mom having to spend more and more energy caring for her grown child suffering from mental illness. Was there help available to her at this stage like there probably was when Adam was in school? Did she take advantage of it given she most likely had the resources to do so? If not, why? Was something getting in the way from a policy standpoint or was there no help out there?
Another fact mentioned is that Adam Lanza tried to buy firearms and was denied. Gun laws worked as intended there, but what's the difference if Adam buys the gun himself or if he lives in a house with pistols, an AR-15, and a shotgun for him to take? Is there nothing that can be looked at here from a policy perspective? Adam had an extended 30-round clip for the AR-15, the gun used to commit most of the atrocities. Sure, it's not fully automatic or capable of three-round bursts, but it is capable of firing off rounds as fast as you can pull the trigger with magazines available to allow the shooter to do that for a good long while (see Aurora). Is there nothing to look at here from a policy perspective?
From later in the article:
I'm not even going to delve into the various "tax/ban" ammunition arguments; they're just a special case of gun control, and about as useful. Regular old bullets are extremely deadly, especially when fired at close range. He didn't need something capable of penetratng kevlar.Then maybe regular ammo should be considered as well under ammo tax discussions? I don't know, but it's worth the discussion. For me, this next quote embodies a lot of the failure behind Ms. McArdle's article:
But we are back to generic solutions. These "reasonable controls" would not, in fact, have done much to stop the horror at Newtown; Lanza's problem was not that he didn't know the four rules of gun safety, or that his aim was bad. And Lanza didn't buy the guns, so a background check would not have stopped him.Maybe all the government can do is offer up generic solutions, but she fails to admit the cumulative effect that a series of "generic solutions" might have. The article demonstrates that a lot of time and thought went into arguing for the status quo, but what's she arguing for, on some level, is why we all should be comfortable with tragedies like Newtown.
From the reaction I've seen, I don't think most people want to feel comfortable with what happened in Newtown. Our rejection of the Newtown shooting necessitates that we try to do better as a society, Hopefully there are people working as hard at trying to discover possible policy solutions to help prevent another Newtown as Ms. McArdle worked at telling us how we can't.
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