Violence is Destroying Humanity... But Not How You'd Expect...

In the media recently there have been several stories being kicked around about violence, of one form or another. Negative stories.
The first type is the sort where something awful happens, someone is hurt, and the instrument that did the damage is blamed, and condemned. This instrument of late has been guns - as it usually is, because its hard to convince Mr. and Ms. America that the Honda Civic is more deadly in the wrong hands and killed more people last year, than a gun.
I will never be able to understand the need to find some outside source to blame for the bad things that happen... especially when that thing being blamed is anything or anyone but the person(s) responsible for the bad thing.
It should be okay to blame people. People pull the trigger... more often than that, people get tanked, hop behind the wheel and plow their SUV's into the side of minivans loaded with families on their way to Christmas with Gran'ma. But people do it. People.
We never blame the car - We always blame the drunk driver. So when violence happens, why is the reaction always to blame the tool, never the user... the killer?
I guess because it’s easier. Guns, weapons of any kind, can be inflated into some greater evil... something on par with what the hearts of good people want the guilty party to be, a great malevolence hell bent on wreaking death and destruction. Satan himself. And no man, or even group of men, will ever... ever be as evil, as vile, repulsive and horrifyingly cruel as what we want to believe they must have been to commit such vile acts upon someone we cared about.
To see a human being as the actor responsible for violence, strikes too close to home to be comfortable for a great many people. It speaks far too loudly at the truth of the human condition, the truth of human nature. A truth that does not fit into the vision, the mythology, of goodness and decency that our society has created. So instead of blaming the person... we blame the weapon, the tool. Which is no more responsible than a drunk drivers car... for no metal thing, no inanimate thing, has a heart, or a mind. But to say a man, and just a man, can be responsible for cruelty, violence, the infliction of pain and suffering onto not just a victim, but the entire family of that victim, requires too much truth about the very nature of what is "Human".
To kill is human.
As is to love.
As is to care, protect, defend, hope, wonder, learn, teach, give, share, help.
But "kill" is an word we cannot let ourselves be comfortable with.
Killing is wrong... it says so in the Bible - "Thou Shalt Not Kill". But what it actually says... what the original wording was, is far closer to "Thou Shalt Not Murder". But, we've had a few thousand years of oral tradition becoming inscription in ancient and varied languages, becoming collection, translation and re-inscription into Latin, and then into French, and English... and then a series of major rewordings and removals of a few things, to create not only the King James Version, but the Holy Mother Churches approved version before it... and then hundreds of other versions, and translations into all the languages of the modern world. At the end of all that a few things are bound to be different... but "thou shalt not kill" is a commandment upon which even the non-religious will throw themselves, as if upon a sword. (Ahh, there I go again with the violence metaphors....).
And, really, why shouldn’t they? The idea that killing is bad is a powerful undercurrent in the mythology most people use to frame their understanding of the world around them, and what is good and decent in that world.
It takes great acts, of horror and depravity, to shock people into remembering that violence, at its ugliest, most horrific, is sometimes necessary. Acts like 9/11, when the passengers and crew of Flight 93 rose up and said, we will not go quiet into that good night... even if it means dying, even if it means killing a lot of people. But that is a massive thing for one little, and quickly fading, wake-up call.
I think it is for the best that most people - sane people - do not embrace the ability to kill and run with it. But to completely shun the ability, to the point at which we try to fervently deny the occasionally, horrible, need for it... goes completely against the natural order.
Like so many things in this world which go against the natural order, which fight so hard to fit the myth we have created about the way of the world that they approach the completely synthetic. It is a sad state of affairs where being human has become a thing to be shunned... the very essence of humanity must be wiped clean and replaced with one that fits the myth. In the end, by trying to suppress all the unpleasant, uncomfortable, parts of raw human nature, we will suppress those our mythology has come to idolize.... like love.