Gordon S. Jackson: What’s the value in other people’s children?

By Gordon S. Jackson

In the Old Testament of the Bible, God warns the Israelites not to do something we’d find unimaginably horrific today: do not sacrifice your children – in their case, to the foreign god, Molech. For some reason, wayward Israelites thought it necessary to curry favor with Molech (also spelled Molek and Moloch), a practice God describes as detestable. Indeed, anyone guilty of sacrificing a child was in turn to be put to death.

Unimaginably horrific, yes. Except that we as a nation are doing precisely that as we offer up our children to another false god, The Gun. Those child sacrifices at Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland and Uvalde, offered up to appease The Gun, are just the standout episodes in this series of repeated civic rituals. They are all the more shocking because they occurred in schools, supposedly safe spaces for children’s growth and nurturing. Not to mention the children gunned down in other settings, which make gun violence either the top or second leading cause of death in our children and adolescents, depending on whose figures you use.

Another mass shooting (more than 200 so far this year) leads to yet more thoughts and prayers from our increasingly depleted supply. And we wonder, will the anger of our modern day Molech ever be assuaged? Will he ever be satisfied and let us end this self-imposed carnage?

More young men (and it’s typically young men, occasionally older ones) fueled by rage or mental illness, or a combination thereof, will turn to one of the nation’s 71,600 licensed gun dealers, which serve as shrines that facilitate another round of child sacrifices. Or the killers will get their weapons from home or somewhere else, ready to enact our society’s ritual of honoring our very own Molech.

There’s a key difference, though, between the sacrifices made to the biblical Molech and our current version: the child sacrifices that Israel’s God so vigorously condemned were done by the children’s own parents. Today, mercifully, killing one’s own children horrifies us – and we are repulsed to learn that even today in some societies parents will kill unwanted baby girls because, well, they’re girls.

No, we in our society value our own children, immensely. It’s different, though, if they are other people’s children. They are the ones our culture allows to be offered on the altar of our modern-day Molech. Not even the fiercest pro-gun advocates would offer their own children to our Molech. But even they must know that this god is not easily appeased and so it is other parents whose children we must surrender.

So, tragic though their deaths are, at least those children aren’t mine. Would I dare say that to the Uvalde parents, who have just marked a year following their unspeakable loss? And would those strident pro-gun people dare to do so? Perhaps this latter group would see school and other shootings as a necessary evil, the price we have to pay for the promise of gun freedom afforded by the Second Amendment. The trouble with a necessary evil, however, as columnist Sydney Harris pointed out, is that we come to see it as more and more necessary and less and less as evil. Hence the unrelenting support of high-powered weaponry, regardless of the resulting damage.

After one of our hundreds of mass shootings, a Japanese woman named Yoko Tuchiya, from Sapporo, said, “I cannot help feeling that our society with no guns is far better than your society with guns.”

But the fact is, the guns are here (another 16.5 million purchased last year alone), and our Molech must be satisfied. So we engage in pre-emptive thoughts and prayers, hoping our children and their school will be spared.

Those prayers ascend to the same God who in the Old Testament warned us sternly against Molech. Now, in our own time, and in a way we could never have imagined, we are living out the folly and paying the price for appeasing an insatiable false god.

Gordon S. Jackson is a retired journalism professor and the author or compiler of 18 books.