Every time I look at or read something about guns and violent crime I can’t help thinking about how blind we all are to the ‘elephant in the room’ – let me explain….

My first conscious presents as a child were a toy gun and toy soldiers, the games I used to play with other children revolved around fighting and ‘pretend’ killing, ‘you’re dead’ was the most common phrase. All the entertainment media I’ve ever watched has been around guns, shooting, explosions, fighting, and death. It was an integral part of my culture, I worked in security, I started martial arts to learn how to hurt other people and it was only my studies of Buddhism and Taoism that made me examine my upbringing, culture and all the assumptions I had of life that I was blind to.

Children nowadays are exposed to it all in an even more remote way through their phones, tablets, TV’s and movies in such a pressured way and they can take part in the most horrific acts of violence ‘remotely’ on their X Box’s and Playstations. They are completely programmed to be able to commit these acts without any conscious analysis of the suffering they might cause. Films and programmes that were strictly ‘X’ rated when I was young would get a ‘U’ rating now and children see everything including violent pornography readily available on their electronic media.

So the answer is not about ‘banning’ or ‘punishing’ things or people, these are temporary measures that in the long run only make things worse, you only have to look at the World at large to see how shooting and bombing people makes a peaceful world.

It’s about education, it’s about a shift of culture, entertainment and media.  We have to look long term and at what we are feeding our children’s minds with, let’s stop worshipping revenge, to divert the minds of a nation all a government has to do is to bring out the programming that has already taken place and isolate and demonise a section of humanity, create a false flag to control them and make money out of  guns, bullets, bombs and suffering.

Our weaknesses will always be exploited. Lasting peace is earned through hard work of creating strong wise individuals who won’t stand for manipulation and no government wants to do that – at the moment.  It’s a chicken and egg situation, people need to be educated to be able to create and vote for the right kind of leaders, but the current crop we have would not do that.

In our own world of martial arts we need to stop worshipping the thugs and start working with the peacekeepers, The control of real violence requires much more training than just scared thuggery, boasting and violence.

Maybe we can use their own tools of social media to change the zeitgeist bit by bit?