Governor: Shootings a ‘cultural problem’

BENTON, KY. >> It was going to be Spirit Week at Marshall County High School. But homecoming events were canceled, the governor was in town lamenting the nation’s moral decay and preparations were being made for the funerals of two 15-year-old children.

Tuesday’s attack by a fellow classmate at the high school left more than a dozen survivors with gunshot wounds or other injuries, and three of them remain hospitalized. Hundreds more were scarred by what they saw.

As students returned to school Friday, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin called on Americans to “wake up” and recognize that school shootings are a “cultural problem.”

“We have become desensitized to death, we have become desensitized to killing, we have become desensitized to empathy for our fellow man and it’s coming at an extraordinary price and we have got to look at the root causes of this,” Bevin said.

“We can’t celebrate death in video games, celebrate death in TV shows, celebrate death in movies, celebrate death in musical lyrics and remove any sense of morality and sense of higher authority and then expect that things like this are not going to happen,” he added.

The Republican governor spoke at a community event in Benton, where he was followed by the father of one of the slain students. Sobbing, Jasen Holt asked for prayers for all the “sweet kids” who were killed, injured or traumatized.

The governor declared a statewide day of prayer Sunday for the grief-stricken county.

Meantime, a Republican senator in the state’s Capitol rushed to file a bill intended to prevent future tragedies by putting more guns in schools.

The legislation from state Sen. Steve West would let local districts hire armed marshals to patrol public schools, make citizen’s arrests and protect people from “imminent death or serious physical injury.” Marshals wouldn’t have to be police officers, but school district employees in good standing who have a license to carry concealed weapons.