Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee attributed the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in part to restrictions on school prayer and religious materials in the classroom.
“We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools,” Huckabee said on Fox News, discussing the murder spree that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, CT that morning. “Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”
Law enforcement has released few details on the alleged gunman, but Huckabee suggested that the separation of church and state may have spurred his rampage.
First off, I’d like to ask everyone in America to join me in inviting Mike Huckabee to STFU. This is as crassly opportunistic and insensitive as the comments of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell after 9/11. America was outraged by those words and we should find these just as bad.
But does it even make any logical sense? By Huckabee’s argument, more religious societies should be more peaceful and more atheistic societies should be more violent. But if we compare Europe and the middle east, we find the exact opposite correlation of violence and religiosity. In fact, logic would dictate that atheistic societies would be more peaceful, simply because everyone has one less thing to argue about.
Just as illogical is blaming violent video games or movies. Everyone has the same video games and American movies have a worldwide audience, so that makes no sense either. These don’t explain why America is more violent than most places other than political and drug-related war zones.
What’s different about America is that we have — by an insane margin — more guns per capita than any other country in the world. America has 88.8 guns per 100 residents — far outpacing second place Serbia, at only 58.2 per 100. The wide proliferation of guns is the problem. Period.
Anything else is just making lame excuses and ignoring the problem. It’s absolutely, 100%, inarguably clear that more guns does not mean more safety. We have more guns than anyone and we’re less safe than most.
