When considering the recent school shootings in Oxnard and at Northern Illinois University, we must return to places such as Columbine, Colorado to find our answers.  The fact that the students perpetrating these acts of violence used guns is of little consequence, primarily because if they did not use guns they would have used some other sort of weapon, i.e. a homemade bomb which may have caused many more casualties.  No, in order to stop these acts of violence from happening again we must look at the underlining cause(s) to why these students did not stop themselves from committing these acts.

Our friends on the left believed they had a perfect solution less than a decade ago. Their solution was and is today to enact a regime of anti-bullying programs that are part punishment, part peer pressure, part Golden Rule, and part political correctness.  Unfortunately, there is evidence that these programs are creating more devious and clever bullies, instead of ending bullying altogether.  No our solution lies deeper in the psyche of these students.  It lies within their basic worldview and how that worldview informs their decision making.

It is reported that on the day of the Columbine Massacre, that Eric Harris, one of the two students who perpetrated that act of violence, wore a white t-shirt that read "Natural Selection" (http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Eric%20Harris).  In a sense, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were thorough Darwinists targeting those they believed to be intellectually inferior to them.  Their targets consisted of the athletes, whom they viewed as popular Neanderthals, and the Christians, who rejected Darwinian Evolution and believed in God.  In Oxnard, the victim was an effeminate boy (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-oxnard15feb15,0,7663055.story). My guess is his killer shared the same belief with the late Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold that he was superior and was fit to determine who is fit to survive.  Reaching farther back to Chicago, we have the murder perpetrated by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb (http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/leoploeb/LEO_COMP.HTM).  Being students of the philosophy of Nietzsche, these two students murdered a classmate by strangulation believing that they were superior and therefore were in a position to determine who was fit to survive.  Both Alfred Hitchcock in the movie Rope and Darryl Zanuck in the movie Compulsion, directed fictionalized stories based on this very same murder.

But how do these students come to this determination that murder is a viable choice?  Why are they unable or unwilling to see the intrinsic value of all human life?  What conditioning has robbed these students of their internal moral compass?  It is by answering these questions that we can begin to see how to stop these school shootings.  Let me explain.

Through the instruction of Evolutionary theory, our students are taught via the media and in all sorts of schooling situations that they are products of Natural Selection, that they are happy mistakes of nature, that they are animals just like apes, and that only the fit survive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest).  They are also taught both in the media and in all sorts of schooling situations(public and in some private and home school situations) Moral Relativism, where truth is subjective and we determine our "own truth" (http://www.str.org/site/PageServer?pagename=search_iframe&cx=012394203280333296866%3Anuevnz1zgwa&cof=FORID%3A11&q=moral+relativism#925).  And finally, through the indoctrination of radical environmentalism, Human exceptionalism is wiped away with the teaching that dogs, cows, and apes are equal to man, if not better than mankind, because for these environmentalist mankind is a disease on the earth (http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-environmentalismaseligion.html).

Add to this the media promotion of the murder of human babies that has gone on since Roe vs. Wade, where sonograms show a human being inside the womb, and where if you were to show little kids that picture they would uniformly proclaim that person in the womb to be a baby, not a fetus, but a human baby very much like we all were at one time.  Then add to the mix media promotion of euthanasia, where because of age, illness, or disability human beings are murdered in the name of assisted suicide or ridding the society of drains on the economy.

Is it any wonder why some of our students have come to the conclusion that there is no intrinsic value to human life?  Is it any wonder why some of our students believe it is okay to take other students lives?  Is it any wonder why some of our students lack a moral compass, that would have stopped them and have them to seek other more constructive means to resolve their disputes?

So what is the solution?  More parental involvement is one answer, where parents become more involved in their children's lives.  However, most parents are forced by economic necessity to work long hours or two or three jobs to make ends meet (http://www.redcounty.com/la/2008/01/its-the-cost-of-doing-business/).  Government must remove some of the reasons why the cost of living and the cost of doing business is so high, by addressing excessive taxation and excessive regulation.  By doing this a deflationary period where prices are lowered by the marketplace slowly as businesses feel comfortable enough to permanently lower their prices will come into being.

Another part of the solution is to teach our students intelligent design theory or at least a critical analysis of the so-called evidence for Darwinian Evolution(http://www.redcounty.com/la/2008/01/why-huckabees-position-on-theo/;
http://www.str.org/site/PageServer?pagename=search_iframe&cx=012394203280333296866%3Anuevnz1zgwa&cof=FORID%3A11&q=evolution#942).  This at the very least forces on our students the notions that they were created for a purpose by a creator that is interested in them and will be the ultimate judge of their actions. What intelligent design will not do is tell them who that creator is, they would still have to look elsewhere for that information, but what it will do is give them some of that intelligent designer's traits and characteristics as observed from the logical conclusion where the science leads.  This further leads to an understanding that there is such a thing as objective truth.

The last part of the solution, as I foresee it is the passage of the Human Life Amendment, which is and has been one of the planks of the Republican Party (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Life_Amendment).  This amendment sends a message to all of our children that Human Life is intrinsically valuable and worthy of preservation, except in limited circumstances where the crime is so heinous society must exact the ultimate punishment, but only after the due process of the law is implemented.

The longer we forestall the enaction of these 3 measures, the more we will be forced to confront the aftermath of more school shootings, mall shootings, and church shootings and the more coarse our society will be towards all human life.  However, by making it easier for parents to be more involved in their children's lives thanks to removing excessive regulation and taxation that has artificially raised the cost of living, by giving our students a scientifically supportable reason to believe that they were created with a purpose that could make the world better and that there is such a thing as objective truth, and by showing our students that we truly believe that all human life is intrinsically valuable we may end these sorts of acts of violence.