President Donald Trump met Wednesday with survivors from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre for a 90-minute “listening session.” During the meeting, Trump pointedly asked, “Does anyone have any idea of how to stop [school shootings]?” Various suggestions were made, and thankfully many of them did not focus solely on gun control measures, but most of the offered solutions still missed the larger underlying issues feeding the problem.

Meanwhile, a CNN town hall meeting in Florida, ostensibly for an open conversation about such tragedies, became a case study in how the Left is using teenagers as human shields to advance an anti-Second Amendment agenda. CNN even scripted the questions of some of the youngsters to scrub any pro-2A remarks – because the event was a setup to bushwhack the pro-2A advocates on the stage.

Sen. Marco Rubio was specifically targeted for his support of the NRA and was pressed to disavow and refuse accepting any future funding from the pro-Second Amendment organization. It was purely a political hit-job designed to blame the Parkland atrocity on Republicans and Second Amendment supporters, rather than any serious introspection on the underlying causes. The twisted implication is that any NRA-supporting or supported politician wants children to die.

Of course, it is much easier to focus on a symptom than the core problem — and guns are not the problem.

What has changed within America over the decades? First, there has been an undeniable systemic disintegration of the American family — most notably, the devaluation of fatherhood and the nuclear family. Much of the fault for this disintegration lies with the government’s failed “Great Society” programs, which resulted in generations of poor Americans enslaved on urban poverty plantations in every major city nationwide. Those urban cesspools have fomented culture devolution.

Second, forced government schooling: By mandating that all children be educated in government schools, tax dollars were allocated only to state schools, effectively forcing children from lower-income households into failing schools. To this day the Democrat Party continues to fight against providing parents “school choice” options for their children, leaving those children trapped in failing schools.

Third, aggressive school secularization: Rather than allowing schools to be a reflection of the broad American religious culture and permitting the free expression of religion within the public school, the government mandated that schools become anti-religious — in effect, expelling God. Leftist jurists outlawed prayer in school, as well as the teaching of Biblical moral concepts, both of which were replaced with radical socialist and anti-religious ideas — with devastating results.

Fourth, moral and cultural disintegration: Young people have been inundated with media violence. This is true of every school mass assailant. They are taught that there are no moral truths, and simultaneously saturated with violence, the staple of “entertainment industry” productions in every medium, and especially video games.

So why are we shocked when some sociopaths project that violence back on those around them?

The big problem here is that mass media, much of the public and politicians rush to blame the tool used to commit the crime rather than soberly asking about the common factors that cause disillusioned, sociopathic young men to attack and kill the innocent, or the policies that centralize their targets. It certainly is not a Second Amendment problem, but something much more systemic to centralized government policies which have resulted in cultural devolution and the disintegration of social stability.