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Last night I was asked to speak to a group of politicians and people running for office this year on behalf of our local community action group.  The other folks speaking had statistics and programs and laws to talk about, I just had a story about an old car, specifically my old car, a 1984 Chevrolet Cavalier.  A marvel of American manufacturing it was not, and it required having a good relationship with a mechanic I could trust.  I talked about the mechanic who helped me keep my beat up old Cavalier running until it had nearly 200K miles on it, he could listen to the car, or your description of a weird behavior and tell you what needed done.  I was speaking to a group of politicians on behalf of a group of people who are mechanics when it comes to some of the broken things of our society, churches, charitable organizations like the United Way and community action groups like Lifestyles of Southern Maryland, we deal with the symptoms and breakdowns of our culture.
Collectively we tried to impress upon the politicians and aspirants in the room that we are doing pretty much everything we can to treat the symptoms, but my point was that we are still driving around in an inherently flawed, poorly designed vehicle like my 84 Cavalier.  We are living in a system that is making all kinds of noises, I think we may have thrown a rod (which I have experienced in my wife's former car, an 81 Buick Skylark, probably one of the only cars that was actually a worse car than my Cavalier).  With regard to last night, the symptoms are people experiencing poverty and homelessness in the midst of an exceptionally prosperous and expensive area.  The system is broken because a household with two wage earners at the $30,000/year threshold ($15/hr, 40 hrs/wk) still falls below the average cost of living in this area by $15,000.  The system is broken because we have numerous people in this county living without safe drinking water or even running water and/or indoor plumbing.
One of the politicians, in true politician fashion asked us, "what change do you think we should make?"  To which the leader of our little gang of do-gooders sort of threw up her hands and said something on the order of, "I don't know and I'm too busy trying to help people to stop and figure it out."  I told the politicians that we are simply too busy and often overextended in trying to help the people who are hurting to think of grand new ideas, and also that we know that the solution to poverty in general is not simple, quick or easy.  We can do our best to fight the crises that inevitably arise with the clunker of a system we have and we can learn to make the most of it, but we need them, the ones we are voting to give access to the actual design of the machine, to come up with the solutions to the problems.
This morning I woke up to yet another shooting incident at a school, this one is less than 45 minutes from my house, it is in St. Mary's County, where some of my congregation work in the schools and at the base at Patuxent River.  This is another place where the system is broken. I have heard a lot over the past few weeks in the wake of the shooting in Parkland, from many sides of the issue, about what needs to be done.  The conclusion I have come to, with regard to the eruptions of violence in our society, is that like poverty, the solution must be more than one thing.
However, our engine is smoking and our transmission is making disturbing grinding noises, there is definitely something wrong.  So guns are not the problem, but honestly they are not part of the solution either. (Note: in the case of Great Mills, it is being reported that an armed School Resource Officer, did confront and use a firearm to stop the shooter, so point for law enforcement on this one)  Mental health is definitely an issue here as well, but it is not anything like the root cause of this sort of thing.  The problem is a system where people can feel so alienated from their world that killing others out of pure malice seems like a good option.  Access to firearms increases the deadliness of these incidents, mental illness is certainly a part of this pathology.  We lack two things on a systemic level:

1. A real grown up dialog about what place guns should have in our culture.  I do not believe that preventing citizens from owning guns is the solution, not here, not now, probably not ever, but if we're going to live with the guns, we need to make sure that we do a better job keeping them in the proper hands, that may require some rigorous and maybe unpopular work on our laws.  The State of Maryland, in my opinion, already has some of the more sane restrictions on the purchase of firearms: waiting periods, background checks and all that stuff.  The guys at the range will complain about how freedom-killing these rules and regulations can be, even as they unpack their AR-15s and various other semi automatic boom sticks. Obtaining a gun in Maryland is neither easy breezy nor impossible, which seems about the right place to be in my opinion.  This happened in Maryland, where we have pretty good rules, so what that tells me is that rules aren't going to solve this problem altogether. What I'm talking about as a grown-up dialog is actually something that I remember used to exist not that long ago. When I was growing up and learning to shoot and hunt, the NRA was an organization that taught you to respect firearms and most of all to use them safely and responsibly, which seemed like the majority of their purpose. There was some mention of the Second Amendment and the rights (and quite a bit about the responsibilities as well) of gun owners, but mostly it was about how to avoid shooting something you didn't mean to shoot. These days they seem to be peddling fear and anger more so than safe hunter training; this, in my opinion is a devolution of their mission.  When I was 14 the NRA represented the grown-up telling me about always pointing the muzzle in a safe direction and triple checking to make sure a gun was unloaded before you did anything. Now that I'm the grown-up they seem to be like 14 year-old boys harboring violent fantasies about defending the American dream with machine guns blazing.  The needed conversation has to happen among the people who know guns and use guns and understand that they are indeed tools, dangerous tools designed to kill things.  It cannot be had if we're busy practicing every rhetorical fallacy on the list in order to prove that we're right or if we let our inner helicopter parent inclinations to just try and make everything super safe win the day.
2. On the mental illness front, it needs to be said that people with mental illness are no more likely to be violent towards others than the general population.  It also needs to be said that someone who is willing to go shoot school children is certainly a psychopath and probably also a sociopath.  We do not have a very good screening mechanism, nor do we have abundant treatment resources when it comes to the kind of severe dissociative problems that would put someone in a place to do such things. We are mostly busy trying to treat depression, bipolar problems and general anxiety that are manifesting at alarming rates among us, especially among youth. As we are learning was the case with the Parkland shooter, there were warning signs and even shouts that something might have been amiss, and yet the system failed to respond in a meaningful, effective way.

Honestly, I don't have any brilliant solutions to this problem, but I'm feeling like this rattling coming from under the hood is not a good sign.