God. Real. Right.

The video below is about the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church shooting Sunday. Such shootings are much more common in America than anywhere else in the world. What seems like a few times a year, someone gathers weapons and ammunition then approaches a public school, college campus, church, mall, or workplace in order to kill as many people as possible, and most often then to kill himself.
There is a sense that some feature of American culture is to blame for this behavior. There are some similar incidents elsewhere–Scotland and Japan have had an episode or two over time, for instance–but not many. So explanations range from the American fascination with and access to weapons to the extreme form American individualism takes. Other explanations are more psychological. Perhaps social pressure to succeed is too great or the attitude that those at the bottom of the economic pile are expendable is too prevalent.
But neither those issues nor any of the other supposedly Read the rest of this entry »