An answer to why Minneapolis Catholic school shooting happened

While training at the gym on Wednesday, I saw a news story on one of the TV monitors dealing with the Minneapolis Catholic school shooting, which had the following headline:

“Community searching for answers after shooting of praying children”

A Wall Street Journal article on the story was penned the same day by their editorial board, part of which took a stab at an answer for the Minneapolis community: “More aggressive identification and forced treatment, if need be, of the mentally ill. Most school shooters have been disturbed young men who also shouldn’t have access to firearms. The mental-health lobby and gun-rights advocates may protest, but a society serious about protecting its most vulnerable needs to have this debate.”

With all due respect to the WSJ editors and those like them who put forth the same two answers (mental health treatment and gun restrictions) when atrocities like this occur, they lack the recognition of the real issue and depth needed to make a meaningful change in our culture.

Let’s start with the last recommendation first: more gun restrictions. Of course, we need to act prudently and do what’s necessary to keep weapons out of the hands of dangerous people, but history has shown that to be fairly impotent where stopping murder and crime are concerned.

The FBI’s crime data repeatedly shows that the majority of gun crime occurs in urban cities with the strictest gun control laws on the books. Moreover, while many decry firearms like the AR-15, the FBI’s historical homicide statistics show that year after year, over two to three times the number of people are murdered each year via a beating (unarmed or armed with a blunt object) than those killed with all rifles, of which the AR-15 is just one.

It’s not “gun” violence we need to solve, but rather “violence” itself.

This leads to the first answer given by many for what happened in Minneapolis, which is that we have a mental health crisis and need expanded treatment for those afflicted.

Now, in the same way it’s smart to keep weapons out of dangerous people’s hands, of course, it’s wise to have compassion and get those struggling with mental issues the help they need. Heck, I battled depression some years back due to burning myself out at one point in my career and other ambitions, and know the benefit of getting the right medications, etc., on board to combat physical and emotional malfunctions in the body.

However, I believe there’s a deeper issue that the media and others often overlook when it comes to tragedies like this.

Absent in the Wall Street Journal article and others I’ve read on the Minneapolis shooting is any mention of the word “evil”. Although the shooter’s statements clearly showcase a tormented and hurting individual, his vile manifesto writings, videos, and messages found on his belongings at the scene tell a pretty clear story.  

But our culture eschews the subject of people being “evil” at all costs and denies it’s even possible.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow said, “As far as I know we just don’t have any intrinsic instincts for evil,” and his peer Carl Rogers asserted, “I do not find that … evil is inherent in human nature.”

Alfred Adler, the founder of Individual Psychology, wrote: “Human beings are not driven by evil instincts but by the striving for significance.” Frans de Waal, an evolutionary psychologist, stated: “Far from being naturally evil, humans are naturally inclined toward goodness.”

And at the end of the spectrum, we have the not-in-touch-with-reality-at-all people like Steven Pinker who say with a straight face: “Humans are not by nature murderous or cruel. Violence has declined across history, showing that our default state is not one of evil but of potential for empathy, self-control, and cooperation.”

Uh-huh.

This thinking produces the idea that people who commit acts like those in Minneapolis aren’t criminals, but rather victims themselves and patients needing to be cured of a material disease. It’s reasoned that some abnormality in the brain is to blame (occasionally, this is the case), and once “fixed,” the individual will become someone like Stephen Pinker describes.

That’s what the family of John Wayne Gacy, the notorious serial killer, thought about him. But when his body was examined by doctors after his death, they admitted after the autopsy that Gacy’s brain was perfectly normal — no defects, no abnormalities, no excuses.

The same was true of Adolf Eichmann, the German Nazi officer who was one of the primary instigators and executioners of the Holocaust. Of Eichmann, Thomas Merton wrote, “One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people … And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.”

Some mental professionals see this. For example, in his book, People of the Lie, The Hope for Healing Human Evil, the well-known psychiatrist M. Scott Peck says: “If we seriously think about it, it probably makes more sense to assume this is a naturally evil world that has somehow been mysteriously ‘contaminated’ by goodness, rather than the other way around.”

That might be going a bit too far, but it sure seems that way most times. Jesus Himself explicitly pronounced humankind evil when He said, “What man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him” (Matt. 7:9-11, emphasis mine).

Remember, that’s the Son of God speaking.

This being the case, what is the recommended cure in Scripture for preventing acts like the one in Minneapolis? The term may strike many as odd today, but the Bible says it’s a “circumcised heart.”

The Bible uses the phrase “circumcised heart” as a metaphor for inner spiritual transformation, contrasting it with outward, physical circumcision. Instead of being about a physical act, it refers to removing hardness, sin, rebellion, and yes, evil, from the heart so that a person can love God and those around them.

In the Old Testament, we find God saying: “And the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live” (Deut. 30:6). This is reflected in the New Testament and the new birth brought about by receiving Christ, which Paul puts like this: “In Him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ” (Col. 2:11).

The “circumcised heart” is something fulfilled in Christ, where believers experience a spiritual cutting away of sin’s power and evil in general. The best way I can think about the inward experience a person has with a circumcised heart is when the thing that a person ought to do is the same thing they most want to do.

That’s the needed cure and remedy for situations like what happened in Minneapolis. A stanza in John Newton’s hymn, “We Were Once as You Are,” describes the end effects of the new birth and a circumcised heart in us well:

“Our pleasure and our duty,
Though opposite before;
Since we have seen his beauty,
Are joined to part no more:
It is our highest pleasure,
No less than duty’s call;
To love Him beyond measure,
And serve Him with our all.”

Whether you’re a Christian or not, think about that. If this were the case in all of us, would tragedies like the one in Minneapolis ever take place? That’s a pretty easy question to answer if you ask me.