Hatred of human life is rooted in moral depravity. Salvador Ramos, who gunned down 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday is a product of moral decay.
The shooter’s father, also named Salvador Ramos, would have you believe otherwise.
“I don’t want them calling him a monster … they don’t know nothing, man,” the elder Ramos told The Daily Beast.
Then elder Ramos said he did see changes in his son in recent months. His son had purchased a pair of boxing gloves and was testing them at a local park.
“I said, ‘Mijo, one day somebody’s going to kick your ass,’” Ramos recalled. “I started seeing different changes in him like that.”
If the father had been around more often, he might have seen troubling behavior in his son long before.
The father said he hadn’t been spending much time with his son due, in part, to the coronavirus pandemic. Because his own mother was suffering from cancer, the elder Ramos claimed he couldn’t risk being exposed to the virus. He said his son became irritated with the COVID precautions about a month earlier. That’s when the son stopped speaking to his father.
“My mom tells me he probably would have shot me too because he would always say I didn’t love him,” Ramos told The Daily Beast.
Ramos hadn’t seen his son since that time. Due to the fact he worked outside of Uvalde digging holes for utility poles, the elder Ramos wasn’t in town much to observe his son’s behavior, pandemic or not.
People who apparently were more familiar with the shooter than his father, former classmates, claimed the younger Ramos had been bullied in middle school for a speech impediment. Former co-workers claimed Ramos could be aggressive. Another former co-worker said he was inclined toward harassing women he worked with. Classmates also observed Ramos’ social life had been on a rapid decline.
The younger Ramos’ internet history, according to The Daily Beast, indicated that he was inclined to boast about mass bloodshed and guns. If the elder Ramos had known his son as well as his classmates, co-workers and internet companions did, would he have intervened?
We’ll never know.
The elder Ramos sports a substantial criminal record. It includes a conviction for assault and causing bodily injury to a family member. Ramos admitted he was also estranged from his daughter. She, too, was frustrated with him for not spending more time with the family.
Ramos blamed his son’s attitude on the boy’s mother, Adriana Reyes. He said the mother failed to buy her son sufficient school supplies and clothes and that the young Ramos was bullied at school because of it. According to Ramos, this was why his son dropped out of school.
There’s a pattern here. A pattern that’s all too familiar. It is the pattern of moral decay.
People are positing all kinds of remedies for the recent mass shootings in America. Stricter gun laws. Armed teachers. Armed guards. Closer monitoring for signs of trouble and deteriorating mental health.
Any one of these alone will not solve the problem. All of them together won’t either. The root cause of moral decay in America is the steady disintegration of the nuclear family and the banishment of God from public life.
The disintegration of the family is related to a leftist drive to push God out of public life. In 1962, for example, prayer was banished from public schools by the Supreme Court. More recently, a city council in Minnesota voted unanimously to get rid of the Pledge of Allegiance at meetings, according to CBS. Without prayer or the Pledge, it’s easy to forget that the U.S. is “One Nation Under God.”
When this happens, it’s too easy for states such as Illinois to allow “After School Satan Clubs” in public schools, as the Belleville News-Democrat reported on in January. At this point, the signs are all but ubiquitous.
Outside of government, Black Lives Matter has admitted, “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable,” according to Politifact. (BLM apparently removed that language in 2020, according to the Washington Examiner.)
It’s important to note that BLM was founded by avowed Marxists. Marxism would abolish both the family and organized religion in favor of a state-run collective society.
But without God, there can be no virtue, because the biblical virtues found in the Judeo-Christian tradition are a gift from God.
We are now witnessing the advanced stages of the cancer of moral decay stemming from the attack on family and God. Getting rid of guns won’t rid us of mass shootings. Neither will arming teachers with guns. Armed guards patrolling school hallways with guns might slow down cowardly shooters like Ramos, but they can do little to nothing to instill virtue in our children.
Guns aren’t the problem. A lack of virtue that gives rise to hatred for human life is.
Virtue is instilled first and foremost by parents. For that to happen, parents must be educated in virtues themselves so they can pass them down through the generations. Once upon a time American society was geared toward celebrating virtue and strengthening it in its citizens. Judeo-Christian values were the foundation of school curricula and laws, just as they are the foundation of the U.S. Constitution.
It’s high time parents start educating themselves and their children about virtue because the schools are no longer doing it.
The elder Ramos spoke out because doesn’t want people calling his son “a monster.” People are called monsters when they are morally depraved. The morally depraved have no sense of good and evil.
It is fair to characterize mass shooters who murder innocent children as monsters. The question is, “How was the monster made?” More often than not, the making of a monster starts at home.
The making of virtuous men and women starts at home too.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
