As the country reels over the Texas massacre, where 19 children and two adults were gunned down by a single shooter who was barely more than a child himself, the question on everyone’s mind is why? Why would any person march into an elementary school and open fire on innocents? And why can’t we overcome such evil?

“Why are we willing to live with this carnage?” President Joe Biden asked. “Why do we keep letting this happen? Where in God’s name is our backbone to have the courage to deal with it?”

Of course, Biden was only asking the “why” questions as a rhetorical maneuver so he could weigh in with his predictable answer: guns. The usual political and media suspects joined the chorus. The left claims firearms themselves are the cause, and anything short of their preferred policy prescription of so-called “universal background checks” and an “assault weapons ban” is “irresponsible and egregious.”

But those who see through the left’s exploitation of this tragedy know there’s something much bigger going on here than a nefarious piece of hardware.

Amid the Texas news updates and hot takes, a stomach-churning TikTok made the rounds on Twitter. In it, a young, pro-abortion mother cradles her infant and says in a sing-song voice to the child, “Hi, I could have killed you, but I chose to let you live,” then likening the killing of babies in utero to killing germs with hand sanitizer.

“Yes, I realize what I just said, and I stand by it,” she concludes.

If Uvalde, Texas, is a tree, this culture of death is the forest. This environment of nonchalant killing is the biome that incubates and grows the most inhumane of humans, who have zero regard for life and bear the nasty fruit of that moral indifference in the form of violence and rape and murder.

It’s the sickest of ironies that the Texas tragedy interrupted the left’s mental breakdown upon learning that their contrived “right to abortion” looks to be ending. After the leak of the draft opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s HealthOrganization, demonstrators harassed and threatened Supreme Court justices outside their homes, sang “Thank God for abortion,” and threw Molotov cocktails into pregnancy resource centers to burn them. Biden and others admitted that abortion kills a “child.”

A few months before that, on the steps of the Supreme Court, abortion activists chanted “Abortion! Pills! Forever!” — all while laughing and dramatically popping pills to symbolize the lethal chemicals that kill human life in the womb. The corporate media routinely suggest that babies would be better off dead than poor.

The left says that pointing this out is a distraction from AR-15s and other killing machines, but it’s impossible to look honestly at mass shootings and ignore the culture of death that prompts them.

This culture is much deeper than abortion, though. That barbaric ritual is in many ways just another piece of rotten fruit from the same Godless tree. It’s in rejecting the Creator’s authority and the truth that He made every human being in His own image and for His glory, not our own, that our society embraces death.

After all, if there is no God who assigns value to human life, we really are nothing more than aimless clumps of cells without worth or eternal purpose. In the name of liberation and rationalism, we’ve instructed our children, who have instructed their children, to believe this. You can be anything you want to be. You can do anything you want to do. And you don’t answer to anyone.

In addition to euphemizing the murder of the unborn, we’ve cultivated an antisocial culture of screen addiction then used it to dispense violence as entertainment. Our men’s primary encounters with women entail objectifying them through porn, and their ideas about sex are born from the same twisted source.

Mothers and fathers leave each other when loving is too hard, instructing their children in self-prioritization. Under the guise of independence, parents instill disrespect for authority and peers. We’ve discarded kindness in favor of “speak your mind” and objective reality in favor of “speak your truth.” When children misbehave, we diagnose and medicate them rather than discipline them.

When we don’t like something, we tear it down even if it doesn’t belong to us. When we don’t like political nominees, we lie about them and try to ruin their life. When we see somebody else victimized, we make the situation about ourselves and riot violently, up to and including murdering people who get in our way.

We have set this scene, yet when the predictable script plays out, we ask, “Why do we keep letting this happen?”

Neither rifle bans, tougher background checks, nor any other “do something!” policy aimed at mass shootings will actually stop the carnage. We’ve created a culture of death, and now we have to live in it.

Reporting by The Federalist.