Our sick society helps breed school shooters

But I don’t care if the NRA likes that idea or not.

But I see the killers as symptoms of a culture that is seriously ill.

We’re all part of the culture. So we shape them, if not directly then indirectly as we pursue our own wants and desires. We till the ground for the young.

Belief in God is mocked in our culture. Religion is belittled. Decency is snickered at. Tradition is deconstructed.

Liberty is defined as doing what we want with our bodies. We glaze our minds with media and say hateful things to people we don’t know by using our phones.

The wave of school shootings dating back to Columbine is telling us something, but we don’t want to understand, because understanding might make us guilty, and get in the way of our true American pastime: seeking instant gratification.

When Peter and I brought our guns to school, we weren’t threats. We didn’t have Twitter or Facebook.

We were just two boys with a good pointing dog on a cool morning in autumn.

We locked the shotguns in the trunk in the school parking lot and parked in the shade. We left our pointer, Jason, in the car with a bowl of water in his dog cage, with the windows half open.

Then we went to class to be marked as “present” before we ditched to hunt pheasants.

“We didn’t think about killing anybody,” said Pete.

“No,” I said. “Dad knew what we were doing.”

Pete had just come back from the cemetery where he’d taken our mom and my wife, Betty. They’d gone to tend Dad’s grave. And when they walked back into the house, I was there with the TV. The Texas shooting suspect’s name was on screen: Dimitrios Pagourtzis.

My mom’s jaw dropped, the immigrant fear of shame brought upon her people was obvious. “He’s Greek?” That doesn’t matter. He’s an American high school student and he’s accused of killing 10 people with his father’s guns.

And now we fight the same fight all over again.