By Larry Craig

Our country has seen an upsurge in violence in the last few years. Our local papers and their readers have been busy suggesting possible solutions to this problem.

Several responses just posted in a local paper are important, because they expose the real issues, though that certainly wasn’t their intention. While specifics may vary, there are two common themes.

The first common theme is that the violence problem is essentially everybody else’s fault. If only everybody else would do more for certain people and certain communities and spend more money, surely that would make people stop wanting to kill people. Or maybe wanting to carjack them.

Some suggestions of things that we can do and spend money on that will reduce violence start with fixing up vacant lots and providing public education for three-year-olds and opening more grocery stores.

I submit that ultimately violence is a personal problem. People are responsible for their lives and the choices they make.

People driven by anger, hatred, frustration, greed, or envy and who have no working conscience and no love or respect for other human beings are willing and even able to unleash evil on and hurt other people.

How is any amount of money going to change that?

Another common theme is mentoring. If only other people would step up and offer to mentor underprivileged kids. That would do a lot to keep them from turning violent.

But every child begins life with two built-in mentors. They are called father and mother. There used to be a stigma for people who had kids when they weren’t married, but we didn’t want people to feel bad about themselves, especially when it was for something that they did themselves, so we essentially encouraged people to have kids without the stable family structure of a father and mother.

Having a father and a mother together can at least have one person providing for the family while the child is young enough to require constant attention. Why do I insist on a father and a mother? Because that’s the only arrangement where the child will have both of its original parents in its life, and generally they are the two people who will love that child more than anyone else.

Marriage is defined differently now than it used to be, but that still doesn’t change the fact that it takes a man and a woman to create a child. And, generally, with few exceptions, those two people will love that child more than anyone else, and when those same two people are the caregivers of that child, that child has an enormous advantage in life over those who don’t.

Any solution that does not take into account the families in the communities we are trying to help will not get at the deepest roots of the problem.

Ending violence requires a change in people’s hearts so that they now love other people instead of hating, envying, or resenting them. And when we still allowed God to be a part of our public life, people learned to have a fear of God, knowing that they will be held accountable for their lives at some point.

It is a fear of God and a love for people that will end violence in society.