{"id":2206,"date":"2018-01-25T00:03:39","date_gmt":"2018-01-25T00:03:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/?p=2206"},"modified":"2021-01-07T18:18:26","modified_gmt":"2021-01-07T18:18:26","slug":"more-mass-murder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/more-mass-murder\/","title":{"rendered":"More Mass Murder"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/deciding-who-dies\/\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/brendans-island.com\/blogsource\/20160719ff\/20151030-800px-Pieter_Claesz_002b-658.jpg?w=640&#038;ssl=1\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Death happens. I&#8217;ll die, sooner or later. That&#8217;s the way it is. I&#8217;ve lasted more that six decades so far. Some folks I&#8217;ve known haven&#8217;t lasted this long. Some will almost certainly outlive me. But like I said, death happens.<\/p>\n<p>But its inevitability doesn&#8217;t make murder okay. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vatican.va\/archive\/ccc_css\/archive\/catechism\/p3s2c2a5.htm#2261\">2261<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;ve probably seen the news. Some high school kids in Kentucky didn&#8217;t go home this week. They were killed at their school:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2018\/01\/23\/580076591\/at-least-2-dead-12-injured-after-shooting-at-kentucky-high-school-school\">At Least 2 Dead, 12 Injured After Shooting At Kentucky High School<\/a>&#8221;<br \/>\nMatt Markgraf, NPR transcript (January 23, 2018)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;ve seen quite a few mass murders in the news this year. That&#8217;s not good. Neither, I think, are reactions I&#8217;ve seen. I don&#8217;t like seeing the usual &#8216;it&#8217;s the other party&#8217;s fault&#8217; from politicos, or assorted other blame games.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s one reason I won&#8217;t blame public education, or say that we must ban high schools now, or demand the immediate deportation of teachers. Another reason is that I think those ideas make no more sense than other \u2014 sadly real \u2014 responses.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/disorders-decisions\/#mass\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/brendans-island.com\/blogsource\/20171117ff\/20171118-Elizabeth_Bathory_Portrait-329.jpg?w=640&#038;ssl=1\" align=\"right\" \/><\/a>Murder, mass or not, is a bad thing to do and nobody should do it.<\/p>\n<p>But it&#8217;s not something new. Hammurabi&#8217;s law code included penalties for murder. And theft. (<a href=\"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/amos-and-social-justice\/#social\">September 25, 2016<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think either can be blamed on technology, and certainly don&#8217;t think we should return to Hammurabi&#8217;s &#8216;steal and die&#8217; policy. (<a href=\"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/california-murders-and-remembering\/#dont\">November 15, 2017<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p>We probably wouldn&#8217;t hear about so many nasty crimes if it weren&#8217;t for Gutenberg&#8217;s printing press and online news.<\/p>\n<p>But I don&#8217;t think we were better off when folks heard little if any news of far-off lands. And &#8220;far-off lands&#8221; meant anything more than a day&#8217;s walk from the village.<\/p>\n<p>I think that America isn&#8217;t perfect, and that thinking about reasonable changes is a good idea. A key idea there is &#8220;thinking.&#8221; Feeling bad about what happened is natural. But we&#8217;ve got brains. Using them seems prudent.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve talked about this before. A lot:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/disorders-decisions\/\">Disorders, Decisions<\/a>&#8221;<br \/>\n(November 19, 2017 )<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/california-murders-and-remembering\/\">California Murders, and Remembering<\/a>&#8221;<br \/>\n(November 15, 2017)<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/murder-again-still\/\">Murder \u2014 Again \u2014 Still<\/a>&#8221;<br \/>\n(November 6, 2017)<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/death-in-las-vegas-and-life\/\">Death in Las Vegas, and Life<\/a>&#8221;<br \/>\n(October 2, 2017)<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/deciding-who-dies\/\">Deciding Who Dies<\/a>&#8221;<br \/>\n(January 11, 2017)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Death happens. I&#8217;ll die, sooner or later. That&#8217;s the way it is. I&#8217;ve lasted more that six decades so far. Some folks I&#8217;ve known haven&#8217;t lasted this long. Some will almost certainly outlive me. But like I said, death happens. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/more-mass-murder\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[212],"tags":[16,82,7,104,140,15,19],"class_list":["post-2206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-being-a-citizen","tag-america","tag-death","tag-getting-a-grip","tag-justice","tag-law","tag-life-issues","tag-reason"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7Dwtw-zA","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2206"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2207,"href":"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2206\/revisions\/2207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brendans-island.com\/catholic-citizen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}