by Bill Fancher and Jim Brown
(AgapePress) – Just two days after a deadly school shooting in California, yet more gunfire rang out in another American school, this time in Pennsylvania.
An eighth-grade girl allegedly shot a female classmate in the shoulder in a cafeteria at a Roman Catholic school on Wednesday before another student talked her into putting down the gun down. Witnesses said the alleged 14-year-old shooter fired at the floor and the bullet ricocheted into the victim, a classmate who police said she had feuded with in the past.
In addition, two students were arrested and a rifle was seized yesterday after a student at a school in Twentynine Palms in the California desert reported hearing talk of shootings at school.
More and more, schools are becoming “shooting galleries” for angry, anti-social kids who have been transformed into killers by our culture, says an expert in the field. Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman of the Killology Research Group has studied the incidents of school shootings across the nation, and he concludes there are several contributing factors that lead to such tragedies.
He says our abortion laws, movies, and television have desensitized kids to killing. Meanwhile, video games have honed their killing skills and rewarded them for the carnage they cause.
“The media adds the cherry on top as the media takes these juvenile offenders and turns them into celebrities,” Grossman says.
Tuesday night, CBS News featured an interview with a teen who had killed two classmates last year. Then yesterday, there was the Pennsylvania shooting and the thwarting of another planned massacre in California. But there is more, says Grossman.
“In the last month we have barely dodged the bullet on major mass murder after major mass murder,” he says. “Four of them were in the news — one in Colorado, one in Kansas involving guns, bombs and guns in a high school in New York, and we barely caught the kid before his mass murder in California.”
Reaction from Other Groups
Jews for Morality spokesman Rabbi Yehuda Levin is mourning for America following Monday’s Santana High School shooting in California which left two dead and 13 wounded.
“This is becoming all too commonplace, and the ingredients of these shootings are remarkably similar,” he says. Like Grossman, Levin believes we are seeing frustrated young people who are being turned into killing machines by an entertainment industry that glorifies violence through music, television, movies and video games.
“They are listing in the media all of the various bands and musical groups, if you can call the stuff music, that are influencing these children,” Levin says. “Basically what we’re saying is that MTV and Time Warner are turning vulnerable school children into killing machines.” Rabbi Levin favors some sort of limited censorship in order to control an entertainment empire that he says could care less about the struggles teenagers face today.
American Academy of Pediatrics spokesman Dr. Michael Rich says many of those in his profession have been asking families to fill out a “media history form” for their children. He asserts the forms prove very crucial in their efforts to care for the total child.
“The media history form is part of an initiative started in 1997 called ‘Media Matters.’ What Media Matters is saying is that media does in fact matter, and to pediatricians it does mean a great deal,” Rich says. He says his organization believes media is becoming a huge influence in the anti-social behavior pediatricians are noting in kids. That is why the Academy is urging parents to be more involved in what their children watch and hear.
David Cho, pastor of the world’s largest church, says school shootings partly result from failure to teach the Ten Commandments.
“Why should those things happen?” Cho asks. “Because they [children] don’t respect their father and mother. If they respect their father and mother, then they’re bound to respect their teachers and elders, and friends. All the ethics start from the respect to the parent.”
Cho, whose church in South Korea has 763,000 members, was a speaker this week at the National Association of Evangelicals in Dallas.
(This update courtesy of Agape Press.)
