When some nut shoots a bunch of people, the Elites and online bloviators* all wait to see what's in the maniac's manifesto, hoping they can use it as ammunition in screaming at the other side. "See! He's a racist!" "See! He's a Trump-hating leftist!"
What difference does it make?
Back in the day, you could buy guns from Sears through the mail. Ammunition, too. We weren't shooting up schools and malls. There are lots and lots of other pathologies running rampant as well, hence our huge prison and homeless populations.
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| I remember seeing ads like this in Sears catalogs. |
I saw a video from Los Angeles of a homeless dude in a wheelchair beating another homeless dude in a wheelchair with a tire iron. Horrific. Since it was Los Angeles, there were plenty of other homeless in the shot. On Twitter, I follow a couple of homelessness accounts from San Francisco and LA. The videos of drug use in plain sight are appalling.
The interview with the Baltimore teacher I posted recently speaks to the same thing. Violence in the classrooms, children trying to perform the roles of fathers because there isn't one in their homes and, of course, hopelessly illiterate kids leaving high school.
When the Secular Left convinced us to ditch traditional, faith-based, bourgeois morality for open-minded love and acceptance, this is what we bought. It turns out that the closed-minded self-denial and self-control of those uptight squares from our past was what kept a lid on our worst impulses.
Every time these shootings happen, we all run around screaming about gun laws. It makes sense. If control isn't exercised at the personal, cultural level, you're going to have to exercise it at the State level if you want to have any amount of order at all.
There will be unintended consequences, of course. Powerful people ruling an unarmed citizenry are likely to do things to us for our own good, but we kind of purchased that when we discarded old-school morality. Oh well.
* - Of which I am one.
I could not agree more. Decades of subverting any semblance of public morality other than, "You do you," and we're surprised when unspeakable evil results? Our culture is obsessed with everyone self-actualizing to his own personal preferences. And there is a not insignificant number of people who prefer slaying scores of other people to living in civil society.
ReplyDeleteWow. That was a terrific summation of what's happening. Thanks for sharing it with us.
ReplyDeleteThinking more about your point, Decades of subverting any semblance of public morality other than, "You do you," and we're surprised when unspeakable evil results?, it reminds me of Barack Obama's description of sin. "Sin is being out of alignment with my values." Well, these shooters' manifestos make it pretty clear that mass murder was not out of alignment with their values.
ReplyDeleteDumping objective morality, something defined outside of yourself, was a really bad idea. We all need some kind of external control. If it's not going to come from religion, then it's going to have to come from the government. If our leaders aren't governed by objective morality, either, then repressive tyranny seems to be the logical end point.
I'm responding pretty dang hard to this because, like a freaking quarter of the city who aren't Mexican and are cheap, my girls got their ears pierced that Pagoda in VC. (They're clean, have awesome rates, they train their folks and are generally really great. Mexicans and folks a few gen down pierce the girls' ears while they're nursing, by hand. No, I can't do that.)
ReplyDeleteI'm freaking LIVID at the folks who look at this intrusion of Juarez standards to El Paso by...demanding Juarez weapons standards.
Thanks, I think you are right that the only realistic method of preventing further atrocities like these (other than complete spiritual revival, which frankly looks unlikely) is tyranny by the government. I think the jettisoning of adherence to and enforcement of objective moral values was the opening of Pandora's Box for our society. Nobody thought that mass murder would be a natural outcome of that shift, but now that we're here, it's too late to go back.
ReplyDelete"It turns out that the closed-minded self-denial and self-control of those uptight squares from our past was what kept a lid on our worst impulses."
ReplyDeleteYou know, there are about 330 million people in the US. If there was one mass killer a day, for ten years, those killers would make up 0.0011% of the population. We are not talking about the typical person, here. We are talking outliers way, way out on the fringes of human behavior.
You could turn 99% of the population into absolute saints, but that remaining 1% would still amount to a pool of over 3 million people to draw mass murderers from. Trying to stop mass murderers by lecturing them about morality has never really worked before,
(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mass_murder_in_the_United_States
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Massacres_in_the_United_States, for starters)
and I don't think you're going to get it to work now.