This is an opinion column.

I keep hearing about the decay of civilization. That’s the real problem, you know. Moral decline. That’s the monster in the room.

We used to be safe, and sound, and godly. But not anymore. Not anymore.

I hear it every time a child dies in a senseless shooting in Birmingham.

Remember when.

Every damn time a shooter pulls a trigger in a crowded store.

Remember when.

I hear it when I dare lament the way we bow down to the gun, right next to the cross, in movies and news and politics and real life. Real, bloody life.

“Not gun dumb ass,” a guy named Robert wrote to me in response to my column after a 4-year-old was caught in the Birmingham crossfire. “It [sic] the people not being raised by real parents. Didn’t happen when I was growing up.”

Tell yourself that, Robert. Seems like everybody else does. It’s the easy answer, punctuation or not. It is the answer that rationalizes a need for all that firepower, that tells us the good old days were sacred and holy and right, and that all would be well if we would simply live as our grandparents did.

“I’ll assume the person who pulled the trigger came from a Fatherless, Faithless, and Uneducated (FFU) home without the guidance, discipline and moral instruction offered by a traditional Christian family,” a guy named Bill wrote to me.

And on it went. The notion that it is other people’s problem, that the world is going to hell in a handbag so you’d be an idiot if you didn’t pack a pistol in the pocketbook.

“You should’ve said, blessed are the fatherless, directionless, reckless, shameless, jobless inner city males,” someone named Pat wrote. “For they are the ones who keep pulling the trigger.”

The message -- with its implicit racism and good-old-days ideal – came at me over and over last week. And then a white guy pulled a trigger a bunch of times in El Paso. And a white guy pulled a trigger a bunch of times in Dayton. And a bunch of people died for no reason at all.

It’s not about moral decay. It’s about an obsession with the gun, the bigger, badder gun, that makes a man bigger and badder than he really is.

Moral decay is not killing us. We’ve been morally decayed forever.

People wring their hands about violence in Birmingham, and they should. It is bad. Almost as bad as it was in the ‘90s. Or the ‘20s. Or the ‘30s, when a professor begged Birmingham leaders to do something, lest the city become the murder capital of America.

We were morally decayed when we believed slavery was sanctioned by God, morally decayed when we allowed the Klan to run over anyone who was different, morally decayed when we used Jim Crow to maintain power, when even the church turned a blind eye to segregation and bombing and economic injustice.

We were morally decayed when black people were lynched in trees across the South, and when police in Birmingham shot dozens of people from the ‘40s through the ‘70s, writing almost all of them off as “justifiable.”

We were morally decayed when we ignored domestic violence and shamed rape victims, just as we are morally decayed when we continue to do it today. We are morally decayed then as now when we use the name of God to oppress other people – when we use God for our own political ends.

We’ve always had moral decay. There were no good old days. The real problem is that we now have moral decay, with a free pass to weapons of mass murder.

Where is the morality in that?

John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for Reckon by AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.