Dec. 14, 2012 is a terrible, tragic, and sad day for the families of those killed in Connecticut, and for our country.  The moral fabric of our nation is dry rotting and coming apart at the seams.  Many will cry out for more gun control, that is simply treating a symptom.  The disease is the moral degradation of our society.  When I was in school in the 1970’s, assault weapons were out there, I knew many who owned them; however, we did not read of such things happening then.  What has changed?  Let’s look at the evidence.

American society has accepted immoral behavior and treats it as normal.  The further our country strays from the Bible, the deeper we fall into an evil abyss where such events as children being killed at school take place.  Socialism breeds atheism.  If you disagree with this statement simply look at American history.  FDR’s “New Deal” started an accelerated drive towards socialism.  LBJ’s “Great Society” pushed the gas pedal a little further.  If you correlate these two events with the degradation of the American moral fabric, you will see an agreement in the timelines.  Our Founding Father’s never intended for the federal government to provide for every need, nor regulate every area of the citizen’s lives.  If that were the case, they would have included it the Constitution and immediately passed laws to enact the entitlement programs we have in abundance now.

Let us look at two Supreme Court rulings that can be correlated to this country’s slide into immorality.  In 1962 and 1963 the Supreme Court made rulings that ended prayer in public schools, prayer that had been happening since the founding of this country.  If our Founding Father’s believed as those too courts ruled, then prayer never would have started in public schools to begin with.  This ruling accelerated the movement away from God in our country.  In 1973 the Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade.  Suddenly, taking the life of an unborn baby, which had been illegal and repugnant to this country, was ruled to be a legal procedure.  This pushed the gas pedal a little further.  If the life of an unborn child is considered to have no significance, is it surprising that generations later some people place no significance on the life of an elementary school student?  Atheism breeds anarchy.  The only way for an atheistic and socialist society to maintain any level of order is to rule with an iron fist in every area of its citizen’s lives, look at the former USSR and present day China for excellent examples.

Why did this tragic event take place in Connecticut?  It happened because evil is taking control of this country and its people.  As God is pushed out, a void is created, a void that only evil can fill.  Look at the evidence that is plainly in front of our eyes and the reason these recent mass killings have taken place is evident.  Whose fault is it?  No, it is not Satan’s fault for he has been here for all of mankind’s history.  The blame is upon American Christians who have sat by quietly and fearfully watching these events take place.  Let us stand boldly and confidently against this attack upon our country by Satan, we have God on our side!  Christians, we can help abate such senseless killings by sharing the God who is being pushed out of our country.

Mark Harwood
Sale Creek

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Some people will use any tragedy to push their superstitious agenda.

The problem is not a lack of "God" - it is a lack of control over just who can have firearms and ammunition. Try to solve that problem, in lieu of ineffectual prayer, and maybe you can actually do something about the situation.

Ike Conn

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I believe Mr. Harwood is much closer to the cause of the tragedy in Connecticut than Mr. Conn.  Whether you want to call it religion, morality, or just plain common sense, our culture has been steadily degraded for at least 50 years.   

Since then, our schools churn out dumbed-down students who are more proficient in video games than math, bad behavior by kids is protected by bad parents who seem to want to be their kids' best friends rather than role models, our government has weakened the family unit under the guise of compassion in the form of grandiose welfare programs, and political correctness has infected our society such that speaking truth can sometimes be construed as a hate crime.   And we wonder why kids such as Mr. Lanza go off the deep end and start shooting innocent people?   

Of course this is only my opinion, but I wish folks like Mr. Conn, who seem so sure of themselves, would start producing evidence that gun control measures would solve the problem.  It seems that all the empirical evidence shows just the opposite such that the places where the strictest gun controls exist are the very places where gun violence is the highest and vice versa.   

Guns have been part of the American experience since our founding, yet it is only in relative recent times that these inexplicable shootings have been taking place.  I am not so arrogant to think that I have the answers as to how curtail these meaningless acts of violence, but I am pretty sure that oppressive gun control measures are clearly not one of them.

Jim Nelson