Authors-choice: Hope & Revival

Sympathies are pouring in for the 10 victims killed and the seven injured on Thursday, when a 26-year-old gunman, Harper-Mercer, opened fire in a classroom at a community college in Umpqua Community College, southern Oregon.

In CNN, a visibly angry Obama pointed fingers at the proliferation of guns as the chief cause of the incessant shootings in America.  He usually does that and it is easy to pick on the obvious; but if we really want to curb this type of crimes we need to go beyond the superficial and look at root causes. Guns don’t kill people, it is people who kill people using guns. This distinction is important, especially when Washington Post, surprisingly, is saying that gun ownership in the United States is declining overall, yet mass killings is occurring with increasing frequency in recent years.

Daily mail profile of Chris Harper-Mercer makes out three things. First,  this guy had a penchant for violence. His profile says that he expressed admiration for Vester Flanagan, who shot dead his former colleagues on live television. Secondly, he loved IRA terrorists and the Nazis, this explains his love for mass killings and atheism

However, when I read that most of the victims were women, an alarm bell went off in my brain. Why does he hate women?  None of the activities in his profile so far could explain his hatred for women.  Perhaps there is something here deeper than meets the eye.  A closer look reveal that Chris Harper loves pornography, and had recently uploaded a significant number of pornographic videos to a file-sharing website.  This I think is the root cause of his love for violence,   mass killing with hatred of women.

There are strong evidential link between violence and porn use. Deseret news reports that pornography leads to violence because the excitement factor for porn diminishes and requires more and more deviant materials to gain the same level of excitement.  “Internet pornography consumers are essentially training their brains to demand violence, because the images available are unimaginably depraved and violent. “

In this book, The Porn Circuit, we see how regular viewing of pornography rewires the brain of an addict, creating such dependency that often has violent outlet.

Russ Warner published a revealing list of serial killers with history of porn addiction, the most famous of whom was Ted Bundy, a convicted rapist and mutilation murderer of Washington, who said that hard-core pornography had a “crystallizing effect” on his violent tendencies and his acting out during the 1970s

Again, Newsweek magazine looked and found a link between prostitution/pornography  and violence against women, and reports that “Overall, the attitudes and habits of sex buyers reveal them as men who dehumanize and commodity women, view them with anger and contempt, lack empathy for their suffering, and relish their own ability to inflict pain and degradation.”

Lastly, Mr Chris Harper-Mercer displayed all the typical symptoms of a porn addict, with his dysfunctional relationships, and an inability to deal with real people, especially women.

In Daily mail, he described himself as ‘shy at first, but warm up quickly’, he said he was looking for ‘the yin to my yang’ and ‘someone who shares my beliefs, and is similar to me’. He described his personality as a ‘lover, conservative, professional, intellectual, introvert’ but said he was ‘not religious but spiritual’ And a neighbor of Harper-Mercer, who lived in Winchester, Oregon, said he ‘seemed really unfriendly.

All these are typical symptoms of pornography addiction. According to clinical psychologist,  Dr. Peter C. Kleponis, ” Pornography harms young people’s ability to have healthy relationships. The message it sends to young men is that women are there solely for their sexual pleasure.”

Perhap, Obama should take a closer look at the proliferation of pornography (it is now a 10 billion dollar per year industry) and the different alternative life styles that fuel sex trade. These are the real root of the ills in our society.  It is time he gets a little angry with the millions of pornography available on the Internet creating a culture of violence for today’s woman and find ways to put a stop to them, that is if he really wants to stop mass shooting.

By Chinwuba Iyizoba

Editor

Authors-choice