In the past day or so an incident of road rage gone bad has left a woman in Las Vegas dead. After being accosted by a man with his car, the woman apparently went looking for him with her armed son.  The end result was not good. A family has lost a wife and their mother over senseless violence that has become epidemic in a sick and malignant culture.

When we hear these tragedies, the anti-gun folks point fingers and scream about outlawing guns.  Some claim no one needs a gun unless you are a police officer.  They point to numerous incidents of children mistaking guns for toys causing massive damage or death.  We read and hear about innocent school children slaughtered by a mentally deranged man in Connecticut and immediately send up an alarm cry “no guns.”  In a safe haven and mentally stable world there would be no need for guns.  If we all respected one another and cherished and valued life, guns would have no place in our world.  Sadly, that is not the case. We have become an angry, seething and hostile society. We are also afraid. We want to point a finger, we want a scapegoat. We want to look for the cause of our screwed up collapsing world so we can fix it or remove the culprit. We look hard for reasons crime happens; maybe they were in the wrong part of town, maybe they were out too late, maybe they knew the person and had a fight. We figure if we can find a reason, we can excuse ourselves from getting too emotionally wrapped up, it won’t happen to us. We fail to understand that it is us. We are the problem.

The pro-gun folk see nothing wrong with ownership of automatic weapons and will argue the constitution to their rights to bear arms. I don’t think our founding fathers had any foresight to what fire power would be available as they were loading their muskets. It is not about the gun but our inability to deal with our own emotional sickness as a society. We have become a society that pits its members against one another; white against black, rich against poor, young against old, women against men, straight against gay and it goes on and on. We cast a suspicious eye upon what we consider to be “the other” while at the same time speaking of our moral religious standards. We pray in a pew on Sunday and denigrate others on Monday. We have come to the fork in the road and we are in trouble. We point our self righteous fingers at those we see as outside of us claiming “they are jealous and trying to destroy our American way of life.” We fail to realize we are the ones destroying us like a cancer eating away from inside. Terrorists cannot do what we are doing to ourselves. If they were smart, they would just take a front seat and watch.