What We Really Need is Soul Control

     Every time there is a mass shooting, there is public outcry to do something, anything, to make them stop . Many cry out for gun control, as if another law will make guns magically disappear. If this were true, the cities with the strictest gun control would be safest against armed criminals when, in fact, just the opposite is true. See Obama's Illinois, for example. It is like believing the Oklahoma City bomber could have been deterred by a "No Parking" sign. Those willing to break laws about murder will not worry about whether their weapon is legal. The problem is, whether it is a bomb, gun or steering wheel, it is not what is in the hand that makes a killer, it is what is in the heart and mind. There are no laws that can change what a person thinks and believes. We can legislate the penalty for taking human life, but we cannot force anyone to value it.
     We especially can't do that when the same legal system allows babies in the womb to be dismembered alive. A few weeks ago our local newspaper had a front page article about Whitefish, Montana welcoming a clinic that provides abortion. It was the same provider who shut her clinic in Kalispell after the trauma of an act of vandalism. Immediately below that article was one about a school shooting in Kentucky. Some chastised the editor, I thought it was brilliant. As a religious man and a conservative, I think he placed it there because the two articles are related. One leads to the other. If unborn human life has no value, what difference should a few years make. As tragic and horrible as it is to shoot children in their school, it is not as violent as vivisecting the most innocent humans in the one place where they should be most safe--the womb. Maybe the sociopaths among us are not the aberrant thinkers we paint them to be. They just carry society's accepted disrespect for God and the people He created to its natural conclusion. Maybe they see clearly what the enlightened pretend they do not, that the birth canal does not change human worth. Either life has value or it does not.
     We need to find ways to make schools, churches and public gathering places safer, but gun control only makes those places safer for criminals. The only way to change anyone's heart and mind is through the transforming power of Christ. What we really need is soul control.