Editorial

Enough is Enough. Mainstream Protestants Should Take a Stand Against Intolerance

Let's face it. All of these shootings are bad news for gun owners. Columbine and Jonesboro and Conyers et al endanger our right to keep and bear arms. The recent shooting of innocents in Los Angeles is only the latest chapter in an unfolding horror story. What causes it?

Do guns cause the violence? No. I grew up in New York City. Harlem and Newark across the river are hotbeds of drugs, guns and crime, but people don't go into schools and mow each other down with automatic weapons. East St. Louis is about as poverty stricken as you can get but it doesn't happen there either. Or has it happened in the Puerto Rican ghettos of our big cities or the Hispanic ghettos of the Southwest. It is not happening among the Jews or the Irish or the Italians or the Polish people either. It is not economic and it is not minorities.

Is the media the cause? No, because all people, Jews, Hispanics, Wasps, Blacks and Italians look at violent television, violent movies and play war games.

The most disturbing thing to me is that fourteen out of fifteen participants in the shootings are all my kind of people - White Anglo Saxon Protestants. We built this country saying "give me your tired and poor". We built a new nation "with liberty and justice for all" where "all men were created equal" with the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".

Now some are trying to pervert the dream by preaching a culture of envy, intolerance and hatred toward, for example Immigrants or Jews or Wall Street or Abortionists. Christ says "Love thy neighbor as thyself". We mainstream WASPs have a responsibility. Go to your Ministers and encourage them to speak out against those who preach intolerance with its concurrent envy and hatred for these are at the root of the shootings - and our Ministers are the conscience of our communities

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Special Note

Our visitors will be interested to hear that we received a telephone call from a young man who went to Columbine and grew up five houses down the street from the school. He said our editorial is correct. This preaching of intolerance is the problem and unless the mainstream members of our communities take action, the killings will continue.