A Sentence No Child Should Ever Have to Say

If this were a television script, most viewers would turn it off.

Not because it was boring. But because it would feel so absurd, so disconnected from how human beings are supposed to behave, that it would strain credibility. People would assume the writers had lost touch with reality.

Yet this week, it was not fiction.

A man argued with his wife because she asked him to stop watching a football game. He killed her. He shot a child. Then he killed himself.

That sequence of events should not be possible in a functioning society. And yet it happened.

Now imagine the child who survived.

Imagine growing up and having to explain, at some point in life, why you are orphaned.

“One night, my mom told my dad to stop watching a football game. He killed her, shot me, and then killed himself.”

Read that sentence again.

Not because it is shocking, but because of how disproportionate it is. A trivial moment. A routine domestic annoyance. Followed by irreversible destruction.

And this is not an isolated story.

In Atlanta, an employee at a Subway restaurant was shot and killed after a customer became upset about a condiment on his sandwich. According to police, the dispute was over too much mayonnaise.

Too much mayonnaise.

In Daytona Beach, Florida, a man shot and killed his wife in front of her parents after an argument that began because he had hidden her motorcycle and refused to tell her where it was. When her parents arrived to help, he retrieved a rifle and opened fire as they tried to leave.

These are not crimes of desperation. They are not acts driven by survival or self-defense. They are explosions triggered by inconvenience, frustration, and wounded ego.

This is not about football. It is not about mayonnaise. It is not about a motorcycle.

It is about the collapse of internal limits.

For most of human history, people understood that emotions had ceilings. Anger flared, but it stopped. Conflict erupted, but it resolved. Even violence, when it existed, followed some distorted sense of proportion.

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Today, something has changed.

Minor friction increasingly produces catastrophic outcomes. There is no pause. No brake. No internal voice saying, this ends here. Not even against family members.

Everything escalates. Everything becomes final.

We live in a culture that trains people to indulge impulse, validate rage, and treat emotional discomfort as an injustice. Self-control is mocked. Restraint is framed as repression. Consequences are always someone else’s fault.

And the innocent pay the price.

Not in abstract statistics. In real lives. In hospital beds. In children who will carry stories that make no sense because the culture that produced them no longer makes sense.

This is not a call for hysteria. It is a call for honesty.

Something is deeply wrong when trivial moments can detonate into annihilation. When anger has no governor. When people cannot tolerate frustration without resorting to destruction.

What’s disturbing is that we now live in a culture where a sentence like that can even exist.

There is a reason Scripture treats anger as dangerous, not merely unpleasant.

There is a verse I am constantly reminding myself of whenever anger rises: “Do not let the sun go down on your anger.” Ephesians 4:26.

God does not give that warning casually. It is an acknowledgment of how destructive unresolved anger can become if it is allowed to fester, harden, and grow overnight.

God knows the danger. He warned us of the danger. But for the casual Christian, and certainly for the unbeliever, that warning is often never learned, or never taken seriously.

Martin Mawyer is the President of Christian Action Network, host of the “Shout Out Patriots” podcast, and author of When Evil Stops Hiding.

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