While the media and politicians race to talk about gun control in the wake of the CT tragedy, the issue is deeper than an inanimate object. What we are witnessing is a confluence of deteriorating morality coupled with a broken family dealing with a personality disorder while feeding the child a heavy dose of violent video games.

Like a garden, our minds, and that of our kids, will reflect what we feed it. Our job as parents are to be the gardeners --- to pour the water on the seeds of love, hope, respect and truth --- not anger, hatred, violence and despair. But in today's fast paced world, we, far too often, abdicate our parental jobs to TV, movies and video games to find that brief moment of peace while our kids are transfixed on the screen. Every parent deals with this.

In those moments of escape, many of our nation's children are playing disturbing games like Modern Warfare and Black Ops Down. These games desensitize our kids to killing. Moreover, a majority of our kids are growing up with a nature deficit disorder as describe by author Richard Louv. Kids, and their parents, are at biological odds when one's existence is defined by video games, TV, computers, movies, cell phones and shopping malls.

For politicians, it is easier to blame the tragedy on guns. But guns do not kill, people do. The decision to pull a trigger whether at a person or animal should never be taken lightly. But like the video games that train our kids to think there are no consequences to pulling a trigger, supermarkets do the same thing, but in a different way. As David Peterson, author of A Hunter's Heart, writes, "our forgetfulness is created by the supermarket, where we pluck from the shelves processed bits of plants and animals that are hidden inside of boxes, cans and packages ---- creating an illusion that we can have food without harvest, that life can be maintained without death, that our daily existence is separate from all other organisms."

While supermarkets are wonderful organizing agents, society would be better off if people periodically harvested the food it ate. Passing another gun law does not solve the problem. It masks it and makes everyone feel better--just like the supermarket. But as the authors of Freakonomics accurately determined, each year more kids under the age of 10 die in swimming pools than by guns. So do we need to ban swimming pools? Of course not! We need to look in the mirror as a society and realize that neither government nor laws will solve a crisis brewing inside a society of individuals that tolerates our kids to be fed and desensitized by video games and movies while being disconnected from the natural world. We need greater balance in our own lives and, in return, we will see a better society. That balance starts from within, stands guard at the entrance to our minds and reconnects back to the plentiful landscape awaiting for our re-emergence.

Chandler Van Voorhis is Managing Partner of C2I, LLC in Middleburg and a member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America and the 2002 Recipient of the ChevronTexaco Conservation Award. He can be reached at chandler@c2invest.net.