Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich suggested Wednesday that the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was caused by godlessness in American society .
“When you have an anti-religious, secular bureaucracy and secular judiciary, seeking to drive God out of public life, something fills the vacuum,” Gingrich said when speaking to 55KRC’s Brian Thomas. “I don’t know that going from communion to playing war games, in which you practice killing people is necessarily an improvement.”
Gingrich then said he wasn’t attacking the computer game industry, but said that a national commission on what affects young Americans should be created.
“Why have we become a society in which so many people have no faith in the future, no belief in themselves, in which they don’t see their fellow Americans as human beings, but as objects,” Gingrich asked.
Thomas offered a statistic from Microsoft that said 50 million copies of the Halo series have been sold , and that people have spent 5 billion hours playing the games on Xbox Live.
“That’s 5 billion hours that, I would argue, is completely wasted, has nothing to do with God, religion, understanding, even connection with fellow human beings,” Thomas said. “It is complete disassociation and connection from fellow man, probably more so than the violence depicted in the games.”
Gingrich then said movies like Natural Born Killers had no social value and that the country needed to have the courage to have a conversation about how violence is depicted in the media.
“How can you possibly justify dehumanizing people to that degree and what do you think it does to young people who watch it over and over again,” he said.
Gingrich isn’t the first Republican to try and link godlessness to the school shooting. Mike Huckabee had suggested that the shooting happened because God and religion had been taken out of public schools . He later clarified his remarks, saying that “We’re asked where was God [in this tragedy] … we’ve escorted [God] right out of our culture and marched him off the public square … and then we express our surprise that a culture without him actually reflects what it has become.”
Do you agree with Gingrich and Huckabee’s comments?
