Christopher Lane was gunned down in cold blood – shot in the back as he jogged alongside a road in Duncan, Okla. His alleged attackers were teenagers who told police they were bored and killed the college athlete for “the fun of it.”

The 22-year-old was attending school at East Central University – an Australian native who played baseball.

Good Samaritans saw the shooting and immediately rushed to offer aid. One person called 911. Another tried to administer CPR. But it was too late. The young athlete with a promising future lingered for several minutes – gasping for air. And then he died – on a lonely stretch of an Oklahoma roadway.

Police Chief Dan Ford said they found a chilling message on one of the alleged killer’s Facebook pages: “Bang. Two drops in two hours.”

“I think they were on a killing spree,” Ford told Australian Associated Press. “We would have had more bodies that night if we didn’t get them.”

In other words – the teenage boys were hunting humans.

In Northwest Indiana, a 17-year-old boy is accused of hunting and killing three kittens with a bow and arrow. Police told CBS News in Chicago the teenager skewered the kittens on an arrow.

Investigator Michelle Dvorscak told the television station the boy posted the photographs on Facebook.

“He did confess,” she said. “He said he was bored out of his mind the week before school started and decided to hunt some kittens.”

In Brunswick, Ga. two teenagers are accused of shooting a young mother and murdering her 13-month-old child. Sherry West was taking her baby out for a stroll when the boys demanded she give them cash.

“A boy approached me and told me he wanted my money, and I told him I didn’t have any money,” the woman told reporters. “And he said, ‘Give me your money or I’m going to kill you and I’m going to shoot your baby and kill your baby.”

She pleaded with them to spare her child – but one of the boys took a gun and shot the 13-month-old between the eyes.

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We live in a nation that celebrates and glorifies violence. The proof is in our movies, our music, and our athletic pastimes.

“Violence has become the new pornography of our culture,” noted author Robert Jeffress tells me. “One cause of the violence is the unprecedented and explicit violence in video games and cable television. It’s desensitized teenagers to the idea of taking a human life.”

Jeffress, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, Tex., said parents bear responsibility for raising a generation of thugs roaming the streets in search of their prey.

“Parents have absolutely failed in their most basic, fundamental responsibility as parents,” he said. “And that is to instill God’s moral law in the hearts of their children.”

The Good Book indeed says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

“As long as you continue to tell teenagers they are nothing but a biological accident, we shouldn’t expect them to act in accordance with a Creator-God who has basic laws concerning life and death,” Pastor Jeffress tells me.

It’s true that American culture has turned its back on God. As a result, we’ve lost our moral compass – replacing the moral absolutes of the Almighty with the moral whims of an all-knowing federal government.

Right is now wrong and wrong is now right. And under the leadership of President Obama criminals have become victims and their prey have become afterthoughts – ingredients for the surge in teenage violence.

“Our culture continues to deny or marginalize the existence of God,” Jeffress tells me. “We shouldn’t be surprised that teenagers would ignore the most basic laws of God – like thou shall not kill.”

And as the stench of our rotting culture sweeps across the nation, I’ve come to the conclusion that we have reached a moment in history when the make-believe world of violence no longer satisfies our bloodlust.

The United States is now reaping what it has sown – for raising a nation of savages.