Indian spiritual leader meets President Biden, suggests ‘peace education’ to address gun violence in US : The Tribune India

PTI

Washington, June 12

An Indian spiritual leader has met with US President Joe Biden and has suggested introducing ‘peace education’ into US schools to tackle rising incidents of gun violence in the country.

Jain leader Acharya Lokesh Muni, who is currently on a month-long trip to the United States, met President Biden in Los Angeles last week on the sidelines of a Democratic Party event.

“The problem is not just the guns, but the problem is with the mindset, the real solution is to train that mindset inside our brains,” Muni told Biden. during a meeting.

“We need to introduce ‘peace education’ right from the primary level itself, and if we manage to do that, then we will find a permanent solution,” he said.

On May 24, a gunman burst into an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 children and two teachers, in the deadliest shooting in the United States in nearly a decade.

Since that massacre, several celebrities from different walks of life have called for “gun accountability” in the United States.

But Muni offered a different take on this complex, deep-rooted and multi-faceted problem.

“The gun is just an instrument, it’s a tool, the real problem is the human brain. I’m not saying this just as an Indian monk or a Jain saint. It’s a scientific truth, medical science also accepts that if the student’s sympathetic nervous system is more active than the parasympathetic nervous system, he or she will enter into an inferiority complex or become as aggressive as students who shoot multiple people in Texas and at University of Virginia,” he explained.

Gun violence is one of the leading causes of premature death in the United States. Firearms kill more than 38,000 people and cause nearly 85,000 injuries each year, according to the American Public Health Association.

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