How Did This Happen?!

   Look below at the two photographs of Adam Lanza and try to answer the question I posed to open and close this morning's show. How did such a handsome, wholesome looking, bright-eyed little boy turn into the slack jawed, vacant eyed weirdo who slaughtered 20 little kids and 6 adults, including his own mother? What caused the frightening transition? How was it allowed to progress without someone intervening to help him, treat him, and/or get him out of circulation so he couldn't become a deadly menace to others and to himself?

  These are questions that must ultimately be answered if we are to minimize, and hopefully eliminate the growing number of mass killings tearing at our hearts and the fabric of our society.

  We've had a couple of back-to-back shows this week which tried to address all the questions raised by the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. We've been blessed by knowledgeable guests and the input from our callers who remain the best audience in talk radio!

 As I leave you for a couple of weeks of vacation, here are some of the angles on this horrible tragedy we dealt with on today's BHL:
 
Gun control - I assure you some form of tighter gun control will be passed by Congress in the wake of the Sandy Hook school massacre. But I also assure you it will not solve the problem of mass killings, because guns are just one part of a multi-faceted problem that qwill require a comprehensive approach if we are to find solutions.

*School safety- Should every school either have an armed cop full time..an armed and well trained staff member, or should teachers and principals be allowed to carry concealed guns in our now gun-free schools?

*Violence - Has violence just become too pervasive and too extremely graphic in our society? Movies, TV, shoot to kill video games, etc? Most keep it in perspective...but some are driven over the edge. Should we tamp down the violence as a society? Can we?
 
*God- The impact of taking God out of public life, and our schools. Faith in God gives believers a moral compass and a conscience...a heightened level of love and concern for others. Seen on a T-shirt: "Dear God...why do you allow such violence in our schools? From a concerned parent.  Dear concerned parent: I'm not ALLOWED in schools. signed God. " Powerful stuff.
 
*Mental health- Whatever is making so many people in America come unhinged....it seems to me that as a society , we are unable or unwilling to intervene when we see someone we know acting strangely. Seems to me we need to get more pro-active in this area....BUT....do we want a society where we're rounding up people because a neighbor called police and said someone's been acting weird?  Feels like Nazi Germany to me. Slippery slope?

 

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