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How did we get to such a state of madness?

"I'm the big man. I got the gun. Why does she have this attitude?"

This was the way a 16-year-old explained killing a mother of three. While Christine Schweiger's 10-year-old daughter watched in horror, two teenagers ordered her to her knees outside a Popeye's Famous Fried Chicken restaurant in Milwaukee and demanded her money. When she said she didn't have any, one of the youths blew away most of her head with a 12-gauge, sawed-off shotgun.

Many years ago, Mao Zedong said that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Mao's maxim is true today in America. For many people, especially young African-American and Latino males in this nation's urban communities, their only source of power and self-esteem comes from a gun. But while the power Mao referred to was political, the violent abuse of power that society is currently plagued with is "driven more by greed." So suggests Jesse Jackson: Today's youth, he reminds us, are "not shooting for food and clothes. They're shooting for territory, conquest, gold, diamonds, cars."

In other words, the violence we witness is power with an attitude, as reflected in the reasoning of the teen who killed Christine Schweiger. It is power that blames the victim for not cooperating with its evil intentions. It justifies itself with a cold, conscienceless attitude that believes its victims deserved what they got. It is like the adulteress of Proverbs 30:20, who "eats, and wipes her mouth, and says, 'I have done no wrong.' "

Why is human life regarded in certain sectors of society as having such little value that, on a whim—without provocation—one human being will blow away another, with no remorse whatsoever? Whether the incident is the Rodney King and Reginald Denny beatings, or the Polly Klaas kidnapping-murder, or the Menendez brothers slaying their parents, the pattern is the same—violence without remorse, power with an attitude, an attitude that says, "You don't deserve to live."

How did we get to such a state of madness, and is there any way to achieve sanity?

We need to understand that violence does not occur in a social vacuum. Our values channel, shape, encourage, or discourage violent behavior.

Neither is the violence epidemic one-dimensional. The causal factors are historical, sociological, economical, political, psychological, theological, and spiritual. Let me suggest several reasons from these varied disciplines, each of which would not by itself be a sufficient explanation. Collectively, however, they provide a formidable argument for why we are in the present amoral morass of violence.

THE LAND OF COWBOYS

In American society, violence is, first, a cultural-historical value. The potential for violence was established from the foundations of our nation, with the Second Amendment to the Constitution in 1791: "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Today, even though the military use of privately owned arms has long disappeared, owning and displaying guns remains a fundamental right in American society.

Later, in the expansion of the nation at the expense of the native population, guns became the means by which the ill-devised Manifest Destiny of land appropriation was achieved. Two guns especially played a key role. The first was the Colt Revolver, patented in 1836 by Samuel Colt. Euphemistically labeled the "Peacemaker," it was better known as "the gun that won the West." The second was the Gatling Gun, a mechanically operated machine gun patented in 1862. Because the gun was capable of firing 350 rounds a minute through its rotating multiple barrels, it was believed to be the gun to end all wars. It did the opposite; it escalated violence.

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August 15 1994, Vol. 38, No. 9