Newtown minister: "Evil visited our town, today." [View all]

I wonder if assigning this horrific act to some amorphous, unmanageable, unseeable force as "evil" exonerates us from our responsibility to act on it in any meaningful way. I know it allows self-serving creeps like Bryan Fischer to make political hay but does it really help the rest of us?

Taking evil out of the equation, as I consider the proliferation of the guns in our culture versus the problem of mental illness, I'm struck by the fact that, again, we can't see, ahead of time, the level of mental illness that result will in mass murder by firearms. But we can see assault weapons.

With that in mind, doesn't it make sense to clamp down on what we can see and touch?

We need to dial way back on the permissiveness of violence in our culture--as portrayed in news, games, commercials, movies, music videos, print ads, and so on. But, until those representations of violence make exceedingly rare appearances, if at all, shouldn't we take the means of their execution in real life out of everyone's hands?

Control what we can, now, and begin working on the rest until, culturally, we're safe again.

*Please move this to the gun forum, if necessary.*