By Father Valentine Istrate

  Another school, another shooting: a 16-year-old had walked into a high school in CA last Thursday shooting one pupil and fired at others. A 20 years young man enters a school in Connecticut killing 27 people, mostly children. In 1996, a man kills 17 children in Dublin, Scotland. In 1999, two young men enter Columbine High School and kills 12 children. In 2007, a man killed 32 people at Virginia Tech University, US. July 2011, a young man kills 69 people in Utoya Island, Norway. And we can go on…

  There are several common coordinates of these tragedies.

 First they are committed by young people mostly students or former students of those schools.

 Another common aspect of these horrors is that the attacker committed suicide. What follows: lamentations, thousands of candles, tears, and incendiary statements… After a week or two everything is erased with a sponge, only to be reminded perhaps a year later, then forgotten…

  Some things are to be said about these tragedies from Western schools. One is that today our young people find themselves in an enormous moral drift, having lost their sense and believes in the traditional values in favor of a civilization based on rapidly infused pleasures/fan, visually and not only. Adrenaline surge in youth can manifests in bodily or mental excitements: car competitions, etc.

 It is no news that our children have become so “educated” in magic, occultism, extremism, firearms and other sinister “games” by modern television and Internet, that from this to the attacks that kill dozens of victims it’s only one step.

  And the fact that the attacker committed suicide means that he can never be held accountable for murder, which is even more absurd.

  Why not ban all firearms in the West? Why not immediately arrest those who own weapons to prevent such disasters? Some will say: crimes can also be committed using knifes. Perhaps, not at this scale. A gun can become a weapon of total destruction, without any possibility of defense.

  Behind these horrors, lies a profitable industry and the billions obtained from this market are more powerful than the cry of a mother longing for her child.

  Meanwhile, world governments indulge in silence, in this “conspiracy” of death, with weapons been only one part of the equation. Thousands of factories working tirelessly to produce death…

  On the other hand, in the United States, the “conservative” mentality focusing on traditional values advocates for the right to possess firearms, allegedly for defense.

 This residue of the past based on fear and “predator ideology” has nothing to do with Christianity as its adherents claim.

  A man carrying a weapon can any time go mad and kill; or it can fall in the hands of an ignorant child, someone educated in violence, or a malevolent. A world ill by nothingness and aberrant in its smallest details should not have access to guns.

  Any argument against a total ban to civilian’ weapons is in fact a play on the scaffold of death, a prolegomena to the kingdom of the one who is a murderer from the beginning of the world – Satan.

  Once I was called to confess a woman in the terminal stage of her illness. Poor woman had only few days to live. While she barely whispered her confession, her two boys “played” outside with two pistols with compressed air, pulling fervently into a trigger, while laughing hysterically and I passed by them with my heart trembling.

 During confession, it was hard for me to ignore the silly shots. The woman in tears tried to excuse her goofy boys. I said only: “God forbid not to shoot at each other.” After only few minutes following her confession, we heard a terrible scream. One of the bullets bounced off the leg of one of the boys. I smiled bitterly and realized that every weapon is actually a toy of the wicked, which eventually triggers his will when you least expect it. The man with a gun in his hand is a device or a prophecy of hades.