Remember Rachel Scott, the first to be murdered at Columbine over 20 years ago, her father Darrell Scott relived it yet again when the horrific news broke from Uvalde. Unless the external of “hardening the target” includes, as he says, the internal of “softening the heart,” murder-minded violence remains seething within the unseen degenerate heart.

“The heart is desperately wicked and deceitful above all things,” s the Word of God says in Jeremiah 17: 9. The bleak appraisal of the heart is affirmed by Jesus who said, “Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder… etc.”

The problem many aren’t seeing, admitting, and confronting is the problem of the human heart. The heart only gets harder and darker in a culture coarsened by normalizing vulgarity, abortion, crudity, divorce, and absentee fathers, not to mention the desensitizing effect of social media platforms and repetitive exposure to conscience-searing sensationalized violence.

The Wall Street Journal commented on Uvalde saying that there’s a malady deeper than what gun laws can fix. Meanwhile, other media outlets opine for more government control over what people own. Shifting the focus to regulation on objects (i.e. guns) misses the very root of the problem.

When Cain slew Abel with a rock, God did not implement rock control, but crime control meting out appropriate punishment for his wicked deed stemming from a sin-tempted heart. To compartmentalize violence and hatred merely as a mental health issue trivializes the seriousness and gravity of what confronts us.

Many foolishly choose to ignore the spiritual component at the core of all this. It’s sin. Sin hardens hearts. The sins of hate, racism and murder are symptoms of the sinful stony heart. The callous heart is the result of depravity. Depravity leaves no one unscathed. Common to all people everywhere, total depravity is at the root of everyone’s life.

The process of narrowing down the entry points into schools to a single point of entry deals with external aspects of security, but do we have to do that if the human heart is good? If the human heart isn’t good, hardening targets externally only leave schools blindly languishing for a solution internally or fruitlessly applying a used “band-aid” on a festering infected wound. What’s more, no matter how hard the soft targets become, we’re still spinning our wheels in the deadly mire of our own depravity thinking the internal solution comes from us.

The internal solution is God’s, making our response key, starting with repentance and trust in the gospel of Jesus Christ delivering a sweeping transformational softening to a hardened human heart.

In his “Defense of the Use of the Bible in Schools,” founding father Dr. Benjamin Rush, distinguished physician and scientist and one of the youngest signers of the Declaration of Independence, wholeheartedly affirmed the lasting value of Scripture in a student’s education and wrote about the regrettable possibility of removing Scripture from schools saying, “I lament that we waste so much time and money punishing crimes and take so little pains to prevent them.”

The Uvalde atrocity exposed external vulnerabilities at schools. It also revealed wickedness far exceeding poor mental health. How we handle matters of the heart will go father in the long run than making sure unlocked outside back doors are secured.

Rachel Scott didn’t have the temporary security of a hardened external target to save her at Columbine, but she had the eternal security of a gospel-softened heart before it was too late. I agree with Darrell Scott’s strategy: “Harden the target and soften the heart.”

The Rev. Mel McGinnis is a Frewsburg resident.