And as another mass shooting takes place at Maine, in the US, leaving eighteen dead, I am reminded of the frequent school shootings happening inside classrooms around America, having parents live in fear as they bid their children goodbye at school gates.

“One for you dad! One for you mom!” The bullets brutally sing out as they burst from guns held by rage filled teenagers and other youngsters, finding targets in classrooms; innocent little children, now sprayed, not with confetti or fun balloons but with lethal leaden ammo, that tears into their tiny bodies, and lifeless they fall, or lie wounded on classroom floor whimpering for a mom or dad who can’t protect them anymore!

But it’s those same absent fathers and mothers, who have made this bearer of firearms a killer. Absent because in their zeal and ardour to fall into the arms of the next pretty woman or handsome hulk in a subway train or office, they leave their little waifs alone, and unguarded. Unguarded not like the babes who’ve died, but unguarded, their growing up minds which with no father or mother to guide them, grow warped, misshaped, and finally with gun in hand enter same school gate to have revenge on those little ones, they feel who got what they should have got; love!

The absence of love, makes killers in a country, where in the pursuit of their own happiness they forge a vacuum in the minds of the little ones who were born to them.

“One for you dad! One for you mom!” laugh the bullets as they lay low those who don’t deserve to die.

It’s not just the easy availability of guns and bullets that cause these massacres, nor is it only the lack of gun laws, but it is I believe to a very large extent, children growing up unloved and unwanted, untrained and unattended and finally unbalanced and unsound!

Family is what moulds and forms a child, and when men and women stop realising that it is not just their pursuit for love that matters but their investment of love, both for one another and into the nest egg they call home, then such tragedy occurs!

A child grows up, angry, resentful, and incensed with society which neglected him.

Unfortunately, as the bullets fly out and later at the graveside the parents weep, it is the wrong father and wrong mother that pay for the sins of another parent who chased love and left a child unloved!

In India, fortunately we can’t carry guns, but knives and acid do the same work, and as divorce starts becoming a way of life and a new generation of children grow up lonely and abandoned, let us learn from the west and keep our families intact so other pa’s and ma’s will not weep for our pursuits of love..!

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