We need to individually check our moral compass

With the recent school shooting in Portland, Oregon, the startling statistic of 74 school shootings since the December 2012 shooting at Newton, Connecticut, was released by Everytown for Gun Safety.
    Without a doubt, I was appalled to hear such a number. How could we not have realized this before?
    Perhaps, as unfortunate as it might seem, we’ve become accustomed to such events. In fact, looking at the recent media attention surrounding the latest shooting, there was significantly less attention paid to the shooting itself versus “higher profile cases” with more causalities, like the Isla Vista shooting in Santa Barbara or the Sandy Hook shooting.
    Why is this the case? It seems abnormal that we should gloss over any shooting, let alone any school shooting, but this is precisely what has been happening.
    How were we not aware of the 74 shootings in the past 18 months? Perhaps it is because we haven’t been paying as much attention. How many people recognized all of the shootings given in the report by Everytown for Gun Safety, a New York-based advocate for gun control? I know that I certainly didn’t recognize most of those events.
    As many media sources have noted, with the awareness of such a statistic will come, as has already begun, a greater call for gun-control laws. While laws will certainly help, I think perhaps we have become too dependent upon protection passed down by others.
    We would do well to learn a lesson from history. In 1843, Thomas Carlyle wrote that reform starts at home. Upon realizing the futility of Britain’s reform bills and Corn Laws, Carlyle writes his proposal for a “total change of regimen, change of constitution and existence from the very center of it it – a new body…with resuscitated soul.” In other words, he called for reform that originates within ourselves, within our view of society and individual selfhood.
    Even with laws, we find that certain people have ways of getting around them. When there’s a will, there’s a way – as the cliché goes. But so, perhaps, is it true that we can begin reform at home, to use Carlyle’s phrase. When will we recognize ourselves, as a society, in the face reflected back at us? When will we interpret these acts of violence as resulting from a society that has, in a sense, lost its way?
     The bigger question for America is not how many more laws can we pass, but when will we start to recognize that we are a country guided by a moral-less compass? When we have lost the importance of the dignity of the human self, of our own selves and those of our neighbors, we have lost the very nature of humanity. I think this is the lesson that we need to learn when we consider such a shameful statistic as that which has been revealed to us.
    Carlyle uses the language of resuscitation, of bringing back to life, of resurrection. We, too, as Catholics, are a people of resurrection. We have been brought back to life with Jesus’ sacrifice of himself for us. As a faithful population, as a church guided by the morals of our faith, as people who recognize the dignity of every person, are we the ones who should lead this resuscitation?
    Our society is not forever lost, but is only a sheep that has wandered outside of the fold. It will eventually realize its waywardness and will, hopefully, return to its morality. Only then, I believe, can reform truly begin.
    Heather Bozant Witcher can be reached at [email protected].