Paul Harvey read this LETTER TO THE EDITOR on his news cast a couple of weeks ago. It was tracked down on the Internet through the San Angelo Standard-Times; give them full credit for this article.
"How can we blame it all on guns? For the life of me, I can't understand what could have gone wrong in Littleton, Colorado. If only the parents had kept their children away from the guns, we wouldn't have had such a tragedy. Yeah, it must have been the guns.....
It couldn't have been because of half our children being raised in broken homes. It couldn't have been because our children get to spend an average of 30 seconds in meaningful conversation with their parents each day. After all, we give our children quality time.
It couldn't have been because we treat our children as pets and our pets as children. It couldn't have been because we place our children in day care centers where they learn their socialization skills among their peers under the law of the jungle, while employees who have no vested interest in the children look on and make sure that no blood is spilled.
It couldn't have been because we allow our children to watch, on the average, seven hours of television a day filled with the glorification of sex and violence that isn't fit for adult consumption.
It couldn't have been because we allow our children to enter into virtual worlds in which, to win the game, one must kill as many opponents as possible in the most sadistic way possible.
It couldn't have been because we have sterilized and contracepted our families down to sizes so small that the children we do have are so spoiled with material things that they come to equate the receiving of the material with love.
It couldn't have been because our children, who historically have been seen as a blessing from God, are now being viewed as either a mistake created when contraception fails, or inconveniences that parents try to raise in their spare time.
It couldn't have been because we give two-year prison sentences to teenagers who kill their newborns.
It couldn't have been because our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud by teaching evolution as fact and by handing out condoms as if they were candy.
It couldn't have been because we teach our children that there are no laws of morality that transcend us, that everything is relative, and that actions don't have consequences. What the heck, the president gets away with it.
Nah, it must have been the guns."