An offering by another pundit this week was that these boys surely must have come from troubled homes. However, that doesn't appear to be the case. In the Paducah shootings, the boy who committed the crimes came from a home of upstanding citizens, leaving his siblings who grew up in the same household to wonder why he committed his killings. And now I must pause here to really question how much weight to give to this accusation against parents. As has been the hope of many secular utopians, parents are no longer the primary influence in a child's life.
Parents fall to a distant third when teachers and television are taken into consideration.
There is no amount of diversity training or stress management seminars that will allow these New Age prophets to deter acts of violence. But there are presuppositions that our society refuses to confront. The first is that deep inside the heart of every person, sin and utter depravity reign as an integral part of our fallen nature. That is too unbearable for us to consider. How deliciously hypocritical that those who claim radical autonomy for man so quickly cast their gaze to every conceivable contributive factor but the free volition of the perpetrators.