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After yet another mass shooting this year, people are looking for answers to this epidemic.
The public is crying out for gun control and reform.
Meanwhile, gun rights advocates scrambled to find a scapegoat.
Some pundits are falling back on the old standbys of mental health and video games.
But a few are falling back on even older arguments. Apparently, teaching the evils of evolution is the reason we have mass shootings.
Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, took to Fox News to share his theory.
Perkins puts forth the idea that the "absence of a moral core" is to blame.
Specifically, he says,
"We've taught our kids that they come about by chance through primordial slime, and then we're surprised that they treat their fellow Americans like dirt."
He goes on to argue that more religion would prevent these mass shootings.
Fun fact: There is a stronger correlation between religion and violence than secularism and violence.
When you look at the countries with the highest rates of homicide, you find nations that have more people who identify as religious. Admittedly, the USA isn't even in the top 50 of nations with the highest rates of murder, but it is still more violent compared to more secular nations.
While the United States has about 4 people murdered each year per 100,000 people, while less theistic nations such as Sweden, Japan, and Norway have rates of about 1 per 100,000.
This kind of argument is to be expected though. Tony Perkins is the president of the Family Research Council, a lobbying organization that has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The FRC tries to push bans on gay marriage and lobbied against repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". Perkins himself believes natural disasters are divine punishments for the country allowing homosexuality, though failed to see the irony when his own home was flooded in 2016.
Basically, this isn't out of the ordinary for him.
While Perkins tries to peddle the evolution scaremongering, the rest of the country tries to do what it can about these mass shootings.
As of September 1st, there have been 283 mass shootings in the US this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The GVA defines a mass shooting as an incident where four people are shot, excluding the murderer.
While people put forth their ideas and suggestions about gun control and gun bans, it can be difficult to say for certain how successful different ideas would be. This is because the CDC effectively cannot research the cause and effects of gun violence due to the NRA.
So while men like Perkins try to blame secularism and the public fights against the efforts of the NRA, mass shootings are set to remain a fact of life for many Americans.
Learn more about evolution with the program Nova: Dawn of Humanity, available here.
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