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Verbum

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Original Essay

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay's first paragraph.

"Children and staff are slaughtered in an elementary school by a crazed individual armed with an assault weapon on the heels of several other incidents of mass murder; the reactive response from governmental authorities is to seek a ban of the type of guns whose only appropriate place is in the military arsenals. The response from the public? Hurry to buy them up before the ban is made law. Cry out that such a ban is unconstitutional as the second amendment provides American citizens a right to bear arms. Have the NRA speak out that it is not the weapons but the mentally ill, the culture of violence, the breakdown of the family that are the real culprits, and underscore a further need for one to “protect oneself”. We have gone mad and now we cannot figure a sane way back to civilized living. At the time of the drafting of the Second Amendment these rapid-fire automatic weapons capable of multiple murders in a flash were not yet invented; so it is hard to cover their ownership under a document written before their invention. The real underlying issue is the age-old question of good vs. evil. It has woven its way through the fabric of humanity from the earliest conflicts, through the rise and fall of empires built on the destruction of others, to the carnage going on all over the world today. The difference in the modern-day times is that it is now in our homes, music, movie theaters, and TV shows gradually infiltrating the souls of young children and desensitizing them to the reality of what violence really is. The blur between the virtual world and the real world has caused the insanity of not knowing the difference. Decades of saturating all forms of media with gruesome gore and unbridled violence whose perpetrators are glorified has finally climaxed into what we witnessed in Denver, Newtown, Webster and so many other incidents of horrific brutality with guns and assault weapons in the hands of those whose minds have been twisted, numbed and addicted to the violence they saw while growing up in a society that normalized it by its very acceptance in all forms of “entertainment’. Think about that for a minute, Entertainment! To enjoy seeing extreme acts of cruelty, annihilation, barbaric slaughter of the most graphic kind! Create games that allow the player to virtually participate in these acts of violence whose sole purpose is to evoke a thrill at accomplishing a heinous act of hunting down, killing, dismembering, exploding other human beings. And you wonder why those raised on a diet of this soul-destructive material turn out to be “mentally ill”? Why isn’t it normal to love to kill? That is what the media tell us, seek out and kill anyone who offends you in any way. The end justifies the means."

First Page

30

Last Page

33

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