Prayers, grief and tears continue to flow for the latest mass shooting, this time in the US state of Connecticut. With so many children involved (20 dead) this one seems even more reprehensible. And as usual, there are a flood of questions being raised: Why? How could this happen? When will this madness end?
We still need to discover more about the details of all this, but it seems some general observations are in order. Why, in fact are we really so surprised when these things happen? Entire generations now in the West have been raised on a steady diet of various things, all of which would logically seem to lead to this very behaviour.
We have had pounded into our heads the idea that there is no God; that there are no moral absolutes; that everything is relative and a matter of personal taste; that we are all just here as an accident of evolutionary processes which “at bottom [shows] no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference” to use atheist evolutionist Richard Dawkins’ words. We are here by accident with no discernible purpose, and we will eventually disappear with no rhyme or reason for our existence – or so we are told.
We have pumped into our kids’ souls mindless, numbing entertainment saturated in violence and bloodshed. Our movies, our music, our TV shows, our video and computer games are all soaked red in gore and extreme violence. Indeed, the leftist Hollywood and cultural elites are getting rich from such offerings, all the while sanctimoniously deploring “a culture of gun violence”.
We have told our kids that morality is a thing of the past, and that they must discover their own ethics and values. We have insisted that one can never judge another person’s behaviour or activity, and we must embrace any and all lifestyles and actions.
We have insisted that all religious beliefs be banned from the public arena, and that anyone who dares to stand for biblical truth must be denounced as a wowser, a bigot, and an intolerant twit imposing his morals on others. We glorify all things radical, immoral, and self-indulgent, while mocking and condemning any call to restraint, to prudence, to limits, to decency, and to godliness.
And then we wonder why we find more and more of these people going around doing these things which we just again witnessed in Connecticut. And as for the assailant, we sadly seem to have the usual description: a rather messed-up person, steeped in violent entertainment, from a broken and dysfunctional family.
One commentator nicely captured this sad state of affairs this way: “As they track down the story of Adam Lanza, and all standard parts fall into place – the weak absent father, the dingbat single mother, the liberal, well-meaning psychologist who was ‘working’ with Adam, the shallow friends who found him ‘edgy’ and ‘different,’ Adam’s cultural life which consisted of an addiction to violent imagery, music, and movies supplied by the same media-political complex that is now feigning ‘grief’ – as all of America is brought before the microphones blinking, crying, totally uncomprehending, we will notice one repeated phrase, a phrase so universal, so emblematic of Liberal America and its mounting catastrophes that I am proposing it become the new national motto, or rather the epitaph to be engraved on the tombstone of the Republic: ‘HOW COULD IT HAVE HAPPENED?’”
Yes we really do seem to be witnessing the end of Western civilisation. We have had a grand social experiment over the past century to see what life would be like when we throw God out altogether from our lives. And guess what? The results are in. The Connecticut massacre is just another bit of the bitter fruit of our wholesale rejection of God, truth, absolutes and morality.
Gun Control
As to the old chestnut that if we just had more gun control, this would not be happening, well, a few words if I may, even though several articles are needed on this to do it proper justice. Every time these things occur, instantly the leftists and MSM start shouting for more gun control. That is their mantra, and we have heard heaps of it again in the past two days.
Within moments uber-lefties like Michael Moore were giving us their wisdom: “The way to honor these dead children is to demand strict gun control, free mental health care, and an end to violence as public policy.” And public policy authority (and evidently part-time actor) Mia Farrow offered us this gem: “Gun control is no longer debatable – it’s not a ‘conversation’- It’s a moral mandate.”
But the simple truth is, the evidence does not bear this out – just the opposite in fact is the case. Thomas Sowell puts it this way: “You might never know, from what they and other gun control advocates have said, that there is a mountain of evidence that gun control laws not only fail to control guns but are often counterproductive. However, for those other people who still think facts matter, it is worth presenting some of those facts.
“Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data. Britain is a country with stronger gun control laws than the United States, and lower murder rates. But Mexico, Russia and Brazil are also countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States – and their murder rates are much higher than ours. Israel and Switzerland have even higher rates of gun ownership than the United States, and much lower murder rates than ours.
“Even the British example does not stand up very well under scrutiny. The murder rate in New York has been several times that in London for more than two centuries — and, for most of that time, neither place had strong gun control laws. New York had strong gun control laws years before London did, but New York still had several times the murder rate of London.
“It was in the later decades of the 20th century that the British government clamped down with severe gun control laws, disarming virtually the entire law-abiding citizenry. Gun crimes, including murder, rose as the public was disarmed. Meanwhile, murder rates in the United States declined during the same years when murder rates in Britain were rising, which were also years when Americans were buying millions more guns per year.
“The real problem, both in discussions of mass shootings and in discussions of gun control, is that too many people are too committed to a vision to allow mere facts to interfere with their beliefs, and the sense of superiority that those beliefs give them. Any discussion of facts is futile when directed at such people. All anyone can do is warn others about the propaganda.”
Or as another author puts it, based on a Harvard study: “Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that do not. The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population). For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland’s murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe.”
As Rachel Alexander says, “Demanding more gun control laws will not solve anything. Gun control advocates have already increased the number of laws around the country requiring background checks, waiting periods for purchases, and tracking of firearms. Many of the rampage killers obtained guns illegally. If they can’t obtain guns, deranged individuals will find other ways to commit mass murders – by setting fires, making bombs or running people over with vehicles. One day after the shootings in Connecticut, a man in Beijing stabbed 22 primary school students with a knife.
“The left should not be allowed to dominate the dialogue after these tragic events with a red herring argument for gun control, in order to sneakily distract Americans from blaming them for what they have wrought. Americans who believe in traditional values must speak up and denounce the degradation of society’s morals as the root of the problem behind these rampages, or the tragedies will continue to escalate.”
Quite so. The specific issue of gun control is the stuff of another article or two. The reality is, until we deal with a culture that has rejected God, extolled self, embraced violence as entertainment, and rubbished the concepts of moral absolutes and personal responsibility, we will sadly see more such tragedies unfolding.
Banning guns or knives or box cutters or stones will not prevent such attacks. Evil is what must be addressed, and evil does not lie in guns or rocks but in every human heart. As Solzhenitsyn once rightly said, “It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.”
And it is that corrupt, broken and evil human heart that Jesus Christ came into the world to redeem and renew. But given that we have told God to get lost from our schools, our public life, and even our memory, then we can only expect to see more such massacres and other acts of evil, all of which flow from the unregenerate human heart cut off from God and his transforming love.
http://dailycaller.com/2012/12/14/liberals-immediately-blame-nra-call-for-gun-control-after-elementary-school-shooting/
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/school-gunman-adam-lanza-remembered-as-a-weird-quiet-loner/story-e6frg6so-1226537700560
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/024011.html
http://townhall.com/columnists/rachelalexander/2012/12/15/rampage-shootings-its-the-moral-decay-of-society-not-guns-n1467549
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