Why the kids?

Another school shooting. This time a gunman kills 3 Amish girls in a 1 room school house in Pennsylvania. This violence is the third US school shooting in less than a week that has killed a student and the killer in a Colorado high school and a 15-year-old boy is accused of killing his principal in a Wisconsin school on Friday. In Las Vegas on Monday, two schools were shut down after reports that a student was seen carrying a gun.

We have not escaped this outrage in Canada either. In September a 25-year-old Quebec man killed a young woman after he went on a shooting rampage at Dawson College in Montreal. The shooter left 19 injured and shot himself in the process.

What the heck is going on? Why are these disturbed individuals going after children? The shooters were various ages with some of them being students but others were outsiders. Yet they all chose schools in which to make their statements and take lives, including their own. Why?

Schools are supposed to be places of learning, of personal growth, a safe place to grow talents and gifts. Now parents, kids and teachers are living in fear that the next person coming through the door of their school will be carrying a gun and a chip on their shoulder. Is the answer really to turn our schools into armed camps with guards at the doors?

I really hope not but are the options? I don't see many. The number of disturbed individuals ready and willing to carry out their retribution on some real or imaginary adversaries appears to be increasing. Without a basic change to our society I don't see this improving on it's own. Reaching out to the disadvantaged, the outcasts, the uncool ones does not come naturally. God calls us to reach out in love to everyone around us including, and perhaps especially, these unloved people. It's only when enough of us take this message to heart that real basic changes will happen.

I haven't given up hope but in the end it might require divine intervention. I hope not.