A Suicide Bomber For Moloch

After every mass killing like the one in Connecticut, there's an agitated conversation about guns. Personally, I'm not sure which way I fall because I just can't get over the feeling that to some extent, guns aren't the issue. I would agree that in a military sense, modern weaponry has put the advantage firmly on the side of the killers. Large magazines and easy firing makes higher kill totals possible. Still, that seems to be avoiding the problem.

In Connecticut as in many others, the shooter turned the last bullet on himself. Had we previously banned automatic weapons, he could have gone in with a backpack full of loaded revolvers and shot, say, 12 instead of 20+. He then would have shot himself long before anyone had a chance to react. Tactically, it's like trying to stop the suicide bombers in Iraq. They had various technologies and sometimes killed a lot of people, sometimes just a few, but they were almost impossible to stop because they could strike where we were defenseless and were willing to die in the process. They are the ultimate guided weapon.

Why are they happening at all? It's not something that has happened throughout the country's history. The LA Times has a historical summary with this graphic.

Mass killings over time, 1985 to present.

It's immediately clear that they're far more common now than they were 20-50 years ago. I don't know much about guns, but I can't imagine there was some technological advancement in the last 20 years that led to the huge increase in mass killings.

Moloch was a pagan god in the Old Testament whose worshipers sacrificed children to him. When I hear of these events, I can't help but think that it's a religious statement of some kind, even if it's not explicit. That's probably just my particular hobby horse, no more or less valid than the political ones, but there you have it.

Why the increases in sacrifices to Moloch?

Something happened to American society over the last 50 years, something dark and evil. Whether its huge increases in the prison population, the Holocaust-level killing of the unborn*, the destruction of the traditional family in so much of society or the slaughter of innocents in frenzied bloodbaths like Connecticut, something has clearly happened.

To my mind, these are the fruits of substituting the State for God and delusions about secular rationality for faith and religion, but I could be wrong. In any case, that timeline above needs to be explained in some way.

* - In 2007, there were more than 1.2 million abortions. At that annual rate, a shooting of 20 children represents a little less than 9 minutes worth of abortions. In other words, even during a mass shooting, abortionists kill at a faster rate.