Virginia Tech – Gun Control or Movie Control?

The tragedy at Virginia Tech has recently renewed the Gun Control debate.

Yet Virginia had already defeated a bill that would have allowed qualified gun owners the right to carry on campus. Maybe if they had put up a sign on campus saying “no guns” this young man may have said to himself “Yeah, I’m pissed off and want to kill as many people as I can, but I guess I’ll just stay home tonight and watch a movie because according to this plastic sign said I can’t carry on campus.”

If you think you can prevent a mass-murderer with an 80 cent plastic sign, then I’m sure that you can book the queen of the fairy people to ride her unicorn on campus and give a talk about her magical kingdom.

We already have a waiting period and background checks in place before it’s possible to purchase a handgun. These measures are only applicable to those who purchase their handguns through channels and from a reputable dealer. These measures do not apply to those who wish to purchase a stolen handgun with the serial number filed off. They do not apply to drug dealers, rapists, or anyone else who may not exactly wish to follow legal guidelines.

I wonder if anyone has bothered to point out that this young kid could have done the same damage by driving his car over people. Or a Muslim terrorist with a hybrid car packed with fertilizer and diesel. (the hybrid car is especially scary since it also introduces hazardous waste into the environment – where’s Al Gore when you need him?)

No, we don’t need more gun control laws, what we need are tighter movie control laws. Apparently the VT killer was influenced by the movie “Old Boy” .

Movies have the ability to get in your head and change the way you think. They have the ability to inspire, corrupt, pervert and all manner of adjectives. While I need to wait 5 days and have a background check before buying a handgun, I don’t think you even need to be 18 in order to purchase the latest bloodbath flick.

Movies like SAW glorify death and torture and blood. More and more we see movies coming out with a PG-13 rating that are celebrations in debauchery, that glorify death. While I never bothered to watch a movie like SAW, I’m pretty sure that the scenes of torture and death didn’t involve handguns because if you really want to entice this type of audience, you make a death slow, explicit, and as graphic as possible.

If we’re going to outlaw things, maybe we need to outlaw hammers (the favored weapon of choice in the movie that influenced Cho, or maybe knives, or baseball bats, or drills, or any manner of power tools, or basically anything that isn’t made by FisherPrice or NERF.

No, what we need to do is start glorifying those things which are pure, lovely, good, that have virtue, that are praiseworthy, those things which inspire us to be better than mere animals looking for blood.

Unless we wake up, what will happen is that Hollywood will continue to push out filth, minds will continue to be corrupted, and you won’t just have mass murders, you’ll also have tortures, you’ll have all manner of fictional scenes recreated in real life, with real people. And the best thing that decent people could do is to purchase a handgun to protect themselves from such corrupted minds and hearts.

You will never stop murders by tighter gun control laws, or even by outlawing guns because what we’re dealing with here is the heart. It’s the heart that has all manner of evils in it, it’s the heart that is desperately wicked – who can understand it?

In Romans chapter 1, Paul lays out the truth of a godless society – people have been turned over to their sinful desires, they desire all manner of wickedness, all manner of evils, greed, and depravity. Hollywood feeds off of this and in turn, Hollywood further inspires this behavior.

In our society, people are not ashamed to watch death and torture on tv, but they get upset at the name of Jesus. Jesus can change a heart, but some people just don’t want to hear that. Jesus can remove this heart of stone, the debased heart, and He can give peace.

Paul also wrote in Romans 1 that he was not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes. Ashamed does not simply mean “embarrassed,” it means that he was not shamed, his witness was not defiled or discredited because the gospel is the power of God. The very power of God brings salvation to everyone who would believe.