As steady readers of this blog know, on the last day of every year, I publish a review of the year's events. The first time I did this, I didn't actually come up with the idea until New Year's Eve; but since then, I have kept a running draft all year, updating it every few weeks until it's time for it to go up.
Since I have been doing these Year in Review posts, I have noticed one or two societal trends in America. A particularly disturbing one is the large number of murder sprees that take place in this country every year. Consider the ones we have seen during the calendar year 2012:
1. February 27th, Chardon, Ohio: a 17-year-old shooter kills three and wounds three at Chardon High School before being apprehended.
2. March 8th, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania: a shooter kills one and wounds seven at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic before being shot dead.
3. April 2nd, Oakland, California: an expelled former student kills 7 and wounds 3 at Oikos University, a Korean Christian college, and later surrenders to authorities.
4. May 15th, Port St. John, Florida: a woman shoots and kills her own four children, then turns the gun on herself.
5. June 10th, Auburn, Alabama: a shooter who later turns himself in to federal agents kills three and wounds three more at a party near Auburn University.
6. July 20th, Aurora, Colorado: a shooter sets off teargas grenades and opens fire inside a crowded movie theatre, killing 12 and wounding 59 before being apprehended.
7. August 5th, Oak Creek, Wisconsin: gunman murders 6 and wounds 4 at a Sikh temple, including one police officer responding to the scene, before being shot by police and then turning the gun on himself.
8. August 16th, LaPlace, Louisiana: in separate incidents, shooters murder two sheriff's deputies and wound two more, before being wounded themselves and/or taken into custody.
9. August 31st, Old Bridge, New Jersey: an employee at a Pathmark grocery store opens fire, killing two before turning the gun on himself.
10. October 24th, Downey, California: three people are killed and two wounded at a business and a residence two blocks apart.
11. October 30th, Chicago, Illinois: a woman murders her own seven-year-old son and a five-year-old girl she was babysitting, ostensibly out of rage that her husband left her to do menial work she considered beneath her.
12. November 6th, Fresno, California: an employee at a chicken-processing plant shoots four of his co-workers execution-style, killing two, before turning the gun on himself.
13. November 30th, Casper, Wyoming: a killer using something on the order of a bow and arrow murders his father's girlfriend, then goes to Casper College and murders his father, then kills himself.
14. December 1, Kansas City, Missouri: Jovan Belcher, Kansas City Chiefs linebacker, murders his live-in girlfriend in front of his mother, then goes to Arrowhead Stadium and commits suicide in front of his coach and several others.
15. December 11, Happy Valley, Oregon: a shooter opens fire inside the Clackamas Town Center mall, killing two and wounding one before committing suicide.
16. December 14, Newtown, Connecticut: the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.
Consider that the nation recoiled in horror at the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago, when seven thugs were murdered by some other thugs in a gang war between Al Capone and Bugs Moran. Such was the public outrage over this butchery that the Massacre marked the beginning of the end for Capone. Now, in addition to the criminal-on-criminal home invasions and drive-by shootings among gang-bangers in cities, we have a massacre nearly every month, sometimes more than one in a month, all over the country, and frequently at random.
We may well ask why. But the better question is: why not? In a country where the murder of babies in their mothers' wombs is enshrined as a constitutional right, where embryos are created and frozen and experimented on and mingled with the genes of animals, and where euthanasia is legal in several states, an explosion of violence was inevitable. Did we really think we could make the spirit of murder our servant, drawing curtains and closing doors on it, imprisoning it inside clinics and laboratories and bending it to our will? We were deluding ourselves.
Come, Lord Jesus!
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