Buffalo and Uvalde
By Hal Lindsey
Something is terribly wrong in America, and we all know it. The depth of that wrongness was front and center again on May 24th when a barely 18-year-old man shot his grandmother in the forehead, then proceeded to an elementary school in his hometown of Uvalde, Texas, and began shooting there.
You know the result—at least 19 children and 2 teachers dead, another 17 people wounded. The children were young… heartbreakingly young. Something is terribly wrong in America, and we all know it.
Nine days before Uvalde, a different 18-year-old attacked a supermarket in Buffalo, killing 10 and injuring 3 others. By his own admission, the shooter came to Buffalo targeting Black people for no other reason than the color of their skin. A day later, a man attacked a church in Orange County, California. A young doctor in the room gave his life to stop what would otherwise have been another mass casualty event. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have already been more than 200 mass shootings in the United States so far in 2022.
With this new tide of evil engulfing the land, many are calling for increased gun control. But with evil engulfing the land, we must be careful not to strip law-abiding citizens of their ability to defend themselves. There is no magic, legislative fix.
The day after the shooting, Texas Governor Greg Abbott held a press conference. A reporter asked about the shooter’s ability to legally purchase two rifles just days after his eighteenth birthday. The Governor said, “The ability of an 18-year-old to buy a long gun has been in place in the State of Texas for more than 60 years…. Why is it that for the majority of those 60 years, we did not have school shootings, and why is it that we do have them now?”
That’s what we should all be asking. What has changed?
The Governor said that in his discussions with local leaders, he kept hearing about the mental health challenges they face in that area of the country. But the truth is, it could be any area of the country. America is going through a mental health crisis right now and it’s like nothing we’ve seen before.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness announced in 2018 that one in five American adults have been diagnosed with some form of mental illness. In 2015, five years before Covid, life expectancy in the US began to fall. The CDC blamed this on increasing drug overdoses, record numbers of suicides, and on liver disease associated with increased alcohol consumption. All of those are related to a deterioration in mental health.
But that just raises another question. Why is mental illness so prevalent in today’s America? The Bible has the answer.
Romans 1:18-32 describes a pattern among nations that have known God, and then turn from Him. Such nations crumble from within. They crumble because their moral strength rots away. Verse 21 says, “When they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations.” Verse 28 tells the psychological result of that. “Even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind.”
As a nation, that’s where we are right now. Uvalde and Buffalo are symptoms of an even greater catastrophe in the making. We must turn back to God, starting with local churches and their leaders. It is time for revival among the clergy. It’s also time for revival for the folks in the pew—revival among all who profess the name of Christ. It must be now… or it may be never.
