Once again violence has struck in Colorado. This time in a movie theater. No one knows why, but again a young man described as “a loner” has committed mass murder.

There appears to be no reason. He dressed up in bullet proof gear, took several guns, and sprayed the audience of a theater showing the new Batman movie. He was known to refer to himself as The Joker, Batman’s ultra-violent arch rival.

Across the nation people are spouting retoric about gun violence. They say we need tougher laws to keep guns out of the hands of such people. Well, I’m open to suggestions. This guy was squeeky clean. He had never even had a traffic ticket. He bought the guns legally, from area gunshops. He passed the federally mandated background check. He jumped through all the hoops the government has devised. Then he did something that to most of us is unthinkable. Now we ponder the evil of it and wonder why. And we wonder how to keep it from happening again. Some of us believe the evil stems from the guns. If we could just get rid of all the guns these things wouldn’t happen.

Let me share a few thoughts with you.

First, guns are not evil. They are merely tools used by evil people. They have no morals at all. They are no more evil than a crayon or a cell phone.

Second, it is not guns that are the problem, it is people and the moral decadence that has swept this nation. The movie where this nutcase did his evil deed was showing the latest installment of the Batman series. It was only one of many extremely violent movies of that genre. People were killed in busloads. Blood was spread in barrels and bucketsful, and we take our children to watch these things, and we allow them to be shown on TV, during Prime Time. Our children, by the time they are grown, have seen, literally, thousands of people violently killed. They have been raised on bloody violence until they are absolutely immune to the sickness that should accompany such horror.

One of the things that the military discovered would allow their recruits to kill was to show them  movies — movies exactly like those that our children are weened on.

Guns are not the problem, we are. We are the problem because we have allowed the people in our society with the least moral fiber to become those who have the greatest impact.

In my day the cowboys never drew blood. If they shot someone they “just grazed him.” They shot the gun out of his hand. They didn’t walk up and coldbloodedly put a gun to his forehead and turn it into a canoe, which was duly recorded on film and shown to the movie audience.

Our society has become more and more voilent. The police are helpless to prevent it, but the masses scream for protection. They don’t realize that the only protection you have is what you carry with you.

In this case the guy was encased in Kevlar, so it would have taken a really good or really lucky shot to put him down, but if there had been a half-dozen trained gun-toters in that theater, that evil little insect would have had more than a quivering, pleading mass of helpless humanity in front of him. A few shots at his face would probably have sent him scurrying for less dangerous environs. People like him almost always pick places where they are safe from harm to do their dastardly deeds. The only guns in that theater were in the hands of the murderer. What would have been the result if there had been guns in the hands of several of the intended victims? I expect there would have been far fewer fatalities.

The cure here is to change our society into one that does not allow such violence to be fed to our children. We do not need gun control, we need movie and TV control. We need to return to the morals that made this nation the greatest in the world and turn from the path that is tearing it down. We do not need gun control, we need criminal control. We need to identify such people when they are still young and either track them. cure them, or control them. If you disarm society, all that you have done is make it a place where the strongest will rule. You people who are not big, strong, fast, and athletic, how do you feel about that? How do you feel about a big brute walking up and slitting your throat with a knife, of bashing you head with a hammer?

Get it together people. The problems are obvious, and they do not include guns. If you don’t want to be a victim, get a gun, learn to use it very well, get a license, and then carry it everywhere, even to the movies.