When I reflect on the shooting of the last few months, I am galled at the chutzpah of the political left.

Leftists are the ones who have brought us to where we are in the wake of the horrific massacre of grade-school children in Uvalde, Texas, following the comparable massacre at a grocery store in a black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York.

Although the blame goes to the shooter, it is the progressive ideology that has set the conditions that make the murders and murderers in Buffalo and Uvalde not only possible but inevitable.

Allow me to explain why this is with a brief overview of systems theory and how it applies to our current debacle.

Although most often associated with industrial production, systems theory also has application to the hard and social sciences.  Systems theory simply holds that the quality of a product is based on the quality of processes used in its production.

From this perspective, the rash of shootings over the last several years indicates flawed societal processes.

According to systems theory, the only way to fix a defective product is to fix the processes that produced the flawed product (i.e., our society).  It follows that to fix the flawed societal processes that have led to mass murder in Uvalde and Buffalo, it is necessary to determine the root causes of those flawed societal processes and fix them.

Any fair analysis of our society would show that mass murder is not caused by gun ownership.  How do we know this?  Because school shootings are a comparatively recent phenomenon.  When I was a teenager in the 1960s, I owned a rifle.  Many of my friends owned or had access to rifles.  Indeed, it was not unusual in those days to see rifles in the racks behind the heads of pickup truck drivers.  I have even had contemporaries from areas more rural than where I grew up tell of leaving their rifles in their cars while they were in school so they could go hunting right after school.

The point here is that, in my youth, firearms were available, but none of us ever shot up a school.  Why not?  Because the values with which we were raised made it inconceivable to do something so barbaric.

So what has changed in American society in the last 50 years to make mass murder not only possible but arguably inevitable?  I would argue that it is the progressive ideology that has brought us to this point.  The progressives have driven God out of schools and to some degree out of society.  They have destroyed the nuclear family.  They have normalized deviancy with gay "marriage," pedophilia, and transsexualism.  They have devalued life with abortion.  In other words, from a systems theory perspective, there were no school shootings fifty years ago because the moral underpinnings of our society did not permit them.

Unfortunately, progressives have destroyed the cultural norms of fifty years ago and replaced them with a nihilism that makes mass murder conceivable.  They have so corrupted the foundation of American society that the slaughter of innocents is not only possible but inevitable.  Their solution to the dilemma of mass murder is to demagogue the issue and blame an inanimate object and the innocent people who own one for the catastrophe.  This will not fix the problem because it does not address the root causes of the problem.  Take away guns, and would-be murderers will find other means: cars, improvised explosive devices, poisons, etc.

Until American societal norms are restored to a point where Uvalde-type massacres are again unimaginable, America will continue to suffer them.

Image: Krauss via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.