We do have a ‘moral issue’ in America, but guns aren’t at the heart

I was pretty excited after getting up early Sunday morning to see the headline in the Sun Sentinel — “It’s a moral issue.” But then I read the article.

I believe the kids in these protests are being manipulated by the media and socalled “free press.” Americans need to wake up to the reality that guns are not the underlying problem and gun control is not the solution.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports prove that the overwhelming majority of gun-related homicides are perpetrated with handguns, with rifles of any kind accounting for less than 3 percent of gun-related homicides. In 2013, 5,782 murders were committed by killers who used a handgun, compared to 285 committed by killers who used a rifle. The same holds true for 2012 (6,404 to 298); 2011 (6,251 to 332); 2010 (6,115 to 367); and 2009 (6,501 to 351). According to the Uniform Crime Reports, more people are stabbed to death every year than are murdered with rifles, and a person is more likely to be bludgeoned to death with a blunt object or beaten to death with hands and feet than to be murdered with a rifle.

We do have a moral issue in our country, but it is not political issue nor is there a political or legal solution. According to Gallup research, more than four in five, 81 percent, of Americans think the overall state of moral values in the country is only “fair” or “poor.” LifeWay research shows that more than 6 in 10 of those older than 45 say right and wrong do not change. For those 35 and younger, fewer than 4 in 10 make that claim. Will a political shift in Tallahassee or Washington D.C. solve all of our problems, or should we be looking into our own hearts as well?

Over the past 25 years, our country has experienced a spectacular rise in all forms of crime, family abandonment, child neglect, suicide, widespread adoption of destructive behavior, and an exponential growth of drug and alcohol abuse. According to the Guttmacher Institute, there were 926,200 abortions performed in the United States in 2014, the most recent year for which data is available. On average, that is 2,537 abortions each day.

Figures from the American Religious Identification Survey by the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society & Culture at Trinity College indicate that 15 percent of Americans now say they have “no religion,” which is up from 8 percent in 1990.

But there is some more news from that survey that is much worse. In that same survey, 46 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 to 34 indicated that they had no religion. Another survey by the Barna group reveals that less than 1 percent of all Americans between the ages of 18 and 23 hold a Biblical worldview.

This clearly demonstrates that the youngest adults in America are rejecting traditional evangelical Christian teaching, including belief that absolute moral truth exists. We have purged Christianity from our public schools and the public square. As Christianity dies, individualism, materialism and hedonism replace it. “Selfies” could be the name for the generation for whom Easter Sunday long ago took a back seat to Super Bowl Sunday.

More than a million abortions a year, legalized marijuana, assisted suicide and euthanasia are seen as the milestones of social progress in the new America. We need a revival in America, not another protest.