Pray for the families who lost children in the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday.  Their grief cannot be imagined or measured.  Pray also for the families of those two brave teachers who died protecting their students.  Their loss is tragic, and their families' lives have been shattered.

But pray for our nation, too.  Former Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus correctly identified the problem Tuesday night on Fox when he said that we as a nation have abandoned God.  Absolutely correct.

Fifty years ago, it would have been inconceivable for any young person to do such a thing.  Kids could and did mail-order rifles, and their parents either taught them how to shoot or enrolled them in a program that did.  These kinds of school shootings just didn't happen.

What happened?

Gaining momentum in the '60s especially, we turned from God, churches, and prayer and to strictly temporal things.  No longer were businesses closed on Sundays.  Church attendance became just a routine or was abandoned except for holidays, and then not even holidays, for many people.

Churches were increasingly infiltrated by leftist ideologues who no more believed in Christ than they believed in life on Mars.  Families broke up.  The Sexual Revolution evolved into an epidemic of divorce and moral degeneracy, where pedophiles are now called "minor-attracted persons" and we are told this should be acceptable behavior.  Children were raised in single-parent households, mostly by mothers.  Discipline in school and at home increasingly broke down.  This snowballed into the cultural trend that now has become the deadly morass we have today.

All this was a confluence of deliberate strategies infiltrated into our culture by the radical left, along with our own accommodating sinful natures, that capitalized on the cultural drift to rationalize a secular, self-driven lifestyle.  As Soviet COMINTERN agent Willi Münzenberg said, "we will organize the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilization stink.  Because only then when we have corrupted all of its values and made life base, can we impose the Dictatorship of the Proletariat" (i.e., communism).  The "intellectuals" Münzenberg mentioned were those smug, tiresome professors, pundits, and politicians who can be flattered into pushing any radical agenda with the "progressive" label while enjoying the material benefits they receive for trashing our nation.

For those who don't understand or prefer to ignore the deadly underlying consequences, our natures prefer moral relativism and the relaxation of moral standards.  Fueled by pride, we get to play our own gods rather than admit that we need the guidance of the true God.  We are not punished for our sins; we are punished by our sins.  These results — school shootings, rampant childhood suicides, divorce, mental illness, and general societal dissolution — are the natural outcomes of a society denying its need for God.  Unfortunately for us all, this is the world we get.  Our only recourse at this point is to ask God for forgiveness and hope for a national rebirth of faith.  God will respond if we ask.

In the meantime, we really have no excuse for failing to protect schoolchildren, given all that has already happened.  But right now we can and should take the immediate measures needed to secure school grounds.  Typical of the left, Democrats have been demanding that public schools remove "safety officers" — i.e., police — from school grounds as part of the "Defund the Police" foolishness.  There should be more, not fewer police, and they should be armed and have much more authority than they do now.  There should be much more willingness to communicate with authorities when people show signs of violent mental instability — as all of these recent shooters did.  And those authorities — and parents — should take responsibility needed to avoid such outcomes.

Those shooters who survive their interaction with police should face the death penalty, administered swiftly and surely, without endless appeals from the ACLU and other similar pro-criminal groups.  School facilities should be hardened to make entry difficult for anyone not properly identified.  Reportedly, despite locks on doors, one door was left open at the Uvalde school, and that frequently occurs, unfortunately, in many otherwise secure buildings, because people choose convenience over safety and security.  Many schools need upgrades.

Overall, it is an inexcusable statement on the condition of schools that these changes have not already been accomplished nationwide.  But in the long run, the only answer is for We the People to return to the God that gave us this great country.  Good decisions and better behavior will naturally follow.

James Simpson is an economist, businessman, and investigative journalist.  His Amazon bestselling book is Who Was Karl Marx? The Men, the Motives and the Menace Behind Today's Rampaging American Left.  Follow Jim on Twitter & Facebook.

Image: Alexas_Fotos via Pixabay, Pixabay License.