Guns and Perps are not the cause of mass shootings. But the Gun Cult does politicize the violence of guns, using gun violence as a reason to buy more guns. How ironic. But that is not the cause. A contributing cause, but not the cause. If we knew the cause there would be no mass shootings because when you find the cause you remove it, and with the removal of the cause, you remove the effects of the cause, which is the mass shooting.

But the fact that the Mass Shooting keeps coming back means that we have not seen the Cause. And as I pointed out in this talk, the Cause is Us. These shootings are the effect of the conditions we have created as our society, conditions which we all participate in unknowingly, but feed the cause we do.

Okay, what is that “habit” we’re giving up? WE live ritualized lives, doing the same emotional habits over and over. The habit starts in the mind, in the emotional currents that like rip tides flow beneath the surface of facts and things. There keep us swirling in a vortex, always eating our own tail.

The Mass Shooting are now a cultural habit, a ritual sacrifice of the innocents that comes back at least every month. A cultural Pain Body, the shootings rise each month to feed. The ritual is the same. Surprise! I thought it was fire crackers. The the Horror, the Horror (all recored on video), then the recriminations. Who is the cause? Then the grief and the parade of innocents, all snatched by death before their time…for what? The shooter is always dead. It is revising Media, a story that dominates attention for days, going over and over the same scenes of screaming people..(thank god it wasn’t me). The ritual sacrifice is the tearing apart, and the death, and then the coming together, feeling great empathy for the victims and families, a great rush of compassion…and then the society settles back to its normal everyday violence until the next Communion with Death happens.

Our society is afraid of death. We control our life and society so that death cannot happen. If death happens we rush to find the cause and eliminate it, like we did with airplanes. This is a mechanical cause of death, which is a failure of the system. But life is not a machine, and you can’t find the single cause. We look on life as a machine, a numbers game, but now the numbers game is us. The body count keeps going up. Wow, the is the biggest mass shooting yet!

Body count was the measure of success in Vietnam. And we are still counting bodies, only now it is us.