First of all, this is not a post I enjoyed writing. It's never good when we hear of senseless violence like this, but it is especially bad when it happens in my home state. Second, my headline says something that the national headlines about this story do not say. In fact, Maggie's Notebook and Conservative Hideout are two of the few places on the Internet where I have read that mentions the significant fact that two of the teens that killed Chris Lane are black.
Let me be clear about this. I am not saying this shooting had anything to do with race. At this time, we do not know that, anymore than we knew the tragic shooting of Trayvon Martin was race related. The race factor, if it exists, has yet to be determined. I just felt it necessary to point out the hypocrisy of the media and the national outrage industry. Where are people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton when they should be raising their voices in protest? No need to answer that question. I think we all know the answer.
I can not fathom the senselessness of this shooting. I have been bored lots of times, especially when I was growing up. During that time, I had access to my father's shotgun, his .303 British rifle, and other assorted firearms. Not once did I, or my twin brother, entertain the thought of finding someone to shoot, just to break up the boredom. We usually went fishing. If the fish weren't biting, we burned a lot of gunpowder and massacred several snakes and snapping turtles, but we never thought about killing someone for the fun of it. If our Dad thought we were too bored, he would find a pasture that had rocks that needed to be picked up, or something along those lines. Trust me, he would take our minds off the boredom.
I am placing this post in the News/Politics category, but it could just as easily go under Society. Our society leaves much to be desired when it can produce teenagers with such a callous attitude towards the life of another human being. I have already read several remarks by people who are outraged that teenagers could have such easy access to a gun and shoot Chris Lane down in cold blood. Many of those remarks have came from Australia, the country from which he came. To those people, I say this.
Oklahoma and America are sorry for your loss. However, we need to place the blame where the blame belongs. Let us not call out an object of steel, plastic, and wood and make it into something evil. Instead, we should place the blame on the real culprit. Our society has failed our young people and that failure has nothing to do with guns. Chris Lane and his family have paid the ultimate price for that failure.
