What kind of world is this anyway?

I must confess...I am feeling very down about the state of humanity right now. I just read a story about and 11 year old boy who had been bullying his 8 year old neighbor. When she refused to let him see her puppy he promptly went in the house and got his dad's 12 gauge shotgun and shot her in the chest killing her. OVER A PUPPY!!!

Now...lest you think I am an anti-gun nut...I grew up with guns in the house. Three of them to be exact. I still have them. I also possessed many toy guns...including toy automatic rifles or machine guns as us older folks grew up calling them. The difference appears to be that despite my parents' overall lack of parenting skills I was taught the difference between what was real and what was fake. I was taught not to point even a toy gun at another person. I was taught not to touch my dad's guns which were never locked up. They were unloaded and the bullets stored elsewhere but I had access to them. Oddly enough...it never would have occurred to me to solve a dispute with ANYONE by using one of those guns! As a teenager I was allowed to touch those guns but it still never would have occurred to me to use one of them to harm anyone. That whole "thou shalt not kill" thing was pretty ingrained in me at a young age.

I don't understand how we got to the point where being bullied, or feeling like an outcast, or being angry at the world, or being told no leads to killing someone. How is that okay? How violent do we have to become before someone says enough? How self-absorbed and entitled do we have to be to think it's okay to kill others to meet our goals? How does wanting to be "famous" or "be someone" become so important to someone that they resort to mass murder!! I got news people...most of us will never be famous...we will never be a household name and we will never be worshiped and adored by the masses. How has becoming famous or "someone" become that important?

We are stressed out. Our brains are over stimulated by too much media exposure. We are obsessed with social media and so called mass produced "reality". We live in a very uncivilized time. Politics has become uber violent. We love our violent contact sports. We make blanket judgments of others with no understanding of their situations. We hate those that disagree with us. We use religion to club one another over the head with our righteousness. We would rather have our ginourmous TV's, our new cars, the newest smart phones, the newest this and the newest that rather than feed the hungry and provide health care to those who need it...especially veterans. We are rude to one another on a daily basis. We are harsh and judgmental and unforgiving of those who differ from us.

Rather than try to re-build the social contract that holds us all together we have instead decided to cling to our guns to protect ourselves. More and more people are getting conceal and carry permits. More and more people, both the mentally stable and the mentally unstable are arming themselves to go out and do the simplest of tasks. How sad is it that people feel the need to arm themselves to go shopping or to the movies? Why do we continue to live in such fear of one another that we would prefer killing someone over working to re-build a more civilized world together? How is killing someone a reasonable response to being told "NO?" What are we doing people? For the love of GOD can we just stop thinking we are SO important that we have the right to take someone else's life! I just need this insanity to stop.