You have a bright idea in the early morning at the start of the Thanksgiving weekend, and then go off the grid for rest and relaxation. Then, Boom! (literally and figuratively). Stuff happens. By the way, if you click on that link, be sure and listen to the full clip. When I say “stuff happens”, I mean it in the Jeb Bush sense that lots of things happen in life, good and bad, and the government is not always the source of or solution to those things. Especially when the bad things are simply a consequence of living in a free society with the freedom to choose how we live, act, think and speak.
So we had the Colorado shooting involving an extremely troubled man, and predictably the media and Twitter went into full hysterics around the typical progressive causes of gun control and abortion. The most bizarre claims being that somehow the highly suppressed and maligned anti-abortion videos released by the Center for Medical Progress were somehow responsible for stirring up “violent rhetoric” that leads to crimes against providers and clinics. Now, I don’t know about you but most of the rhetoric I read about from the right centered around the heinous act of harvesting baby body parts for money and how it was sickening, callous and should be stopped and Planned Parenthood investigated. And really, if you’re not at least a little agitated or angered by the abortion industry harvesting aborted babies’ body parts, you have a serious problem of conscience. Oh, and I guess there was rhetoric about defunding Planned Parenthood, which finally has some congressional action.
Clearly, there is an unstable man who is responsible for his actions, but that would be too easy. Declaring this a mental health issue or simply the actions of free moral agent, a person who makes and is responsible for their own choices doesn’t fit the progressive narrative. You see, when bad things happen the media must maintain the progressive narrative about the goodness of gun control and the blessings of abortion. How else will the agenda be pushed to the masses?
Then not a few days later, we have the Islamic terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, CA. Gasp! Yes, I called it Islamic Terrorism. Again, the leftist media and Twitterverse went ballistic. Prayer-shaming, as pointed out by Emma Green in The Atlantic, is now apparently the new thing thanks to many on the Left. There were immediate calls for more government intervention with gun control legislation, it’s a Pavlovian response really. The cry for more legislation, more controls, more rules is basically the secular left’s prayer to the higher power of Government as Mollie Hemingway writes about at The Federalist.
But for all the appeals and all the proposals on the table, none, nada, zip, zilch, zero, absolutely not a one of the laws or regulations would have stopped anything. Not “Common-sense gun safety laws“. It is a phrase you hear frequently, but is left vaguely undefined; so until there is a definition and a proposal the phrase won’t stop a thing (it’s sort of like hashtags). Not (stricter) background checks, since the female San Bernardino shooter apparently passed the DHS Counter Terrorism Background Check as part of her visa process. Which, by the way, is one of the screenings that will be used for those refugees the President wants to invite to our country. Not the addition of the unconstitutional and civil rights violating “no-fly list”, as both the man and woman were free to fly to and/or from Saudi Arabia without issue.
But getting back to the beginning. Freedom. We live in a free country. We have the Constitution and the 1st and 2nd Amendments enshrine certain rights. And I’d rather live more free, than less free. In the public arena, I or others might disagree with you, hurt your feelings or challenge your thinking with the words we write or speak, that is the price of freedom and the exercise of it.
Sadly and very unfortunately, and I’m really not trying to be callous or insensitive, people will die because we have the freedom to own firearms in this country. People will pay the ultimate price for this particular right. The issue is not the 2nd Amendment or gun ownership or even the types of guns people own. The ultimate problem is the condition of a person’s heart, which is not easily fixed.
Free people are free to make choices, for good or ill. People choose to act on anger, malice, jealousy, bitterness, ideology or with outright evil intent in heinous, cruel and sometimes inexplicable ways including murdering other human beings. It has happened since the beginning of time, since before guns were invented, since Cain murdered his brother Abel. Even if there were no weapons left on the planet, people would still use their hands to murder each other. “Gun control” is simply a modern band-aid covering an ancient issue, and to ignore the deceitful wickedness that lies in a person’s heart, is to ignore the real issue entirely.
TL;DR
People murder other people in senseless violent acts. Left calls for more gun control, supports abortion. Right stands ground on 2nd Amendment, prays. Left name calls and smears the Right. Left thinks government is the answer to all of life’s problems. Right thinks that God should top that list along with the Constitution. In the end do you want to be more or less free? The heart of man is deceitfully wicked, and that is the real problem.