We are stunned once again by another act of senseless carnage. And once again, the blood had barely dried before an endless stream of calls for gun restrictions ensued. This is turn is met with a far more muted call for more guns and the arming of people within schools. Both have some sense to them. And both miss the point. And perhaps them missing the point is the point.
On the one hand, gun control seems like common sense. The less guns on hand in general, the harder it is to find one with which to shoot people. The less powerful and less able to fire rapidly, then less possible destruction. The same day as the Newtown, Conn. massacre, a man in Chengping, China slashed 22 children and one adult with a knife. The major difference is that all 22 children lived. That is not to say that all Chinese school massacres ended so well, but that the death toll is often considerably lower.
So, fully automatic weapons are already illegal. Let's further restrict semi-automatic versions of the assault rifles. Adam Lanza had one. But the shooters at Columbine didn't, instead using shotguns and a semi-automatic handgun. So restrict those too. In fact, carry this out further and you really need to ban every gun since just about every gun type is represented in such school or other public shootings.
But there are problems with this. Firstly, it's much easier to ban future gun sales, than to find and confiscate owned weapons. So a ban now might only have an effect decades from now as existing guns break and cannot be replaced.
Secondly, you can start outlawing and confiscating increasingly less destructive guns. But that only works on law-abiding citizens willing to turn them over. Criminals have no interest in complying. Disarming the general population makes them more vulnerable to armed criminals, absent other steps. Also, it will likely develop a black market that exists for people who shouldn't have such weapons to pay more to procure them anyway.
Keeping guns out of the hands of the population can limit such incidents where the shooters are not hardened criminals used to manipulating the system, but you're unlikely to stop them. And anyway, if drugs can come over the Mexican border, so can (and do) guns.
Finally, it doesn't stop people from doing what they really want to do. The worst school massacre was back in 1927, in Michigan.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
Guns were more legal, but the shooter preferred dynamite, which was legal for sale to farms for a variety of good purposes. Fast forward to the 1990s and Timothy McVeigh used a homemade massive feritilizer bomb for his carnage. When all else fails, men from China use knives.
The law might limit the destruction but it can't escape human inginuity. The unintended consequence of disarming the population is that criminals who keep their guns anyway become emboldened to do as they please.
Then there is the other side. One man wishes that the principal had a gun of their own to put a stop to this. This is foolish also. Principals and teachers aren't soldiers. This the same thing with post-911 asking pilots to carry guns. Yes, there are scenarios where it would have been handy to have something, anything at hand. But the idea of placing guns in such proximity with kids is unnerving. Carelessness happens. The principal shoots and misses and hits a kid.
No, you need training. Armed security guards are a start. We already have these at some public schools. Do it for all. Metal detectors. An intrusive security presence. Put the same level of security that we have now in federal buildings and embassies in schools. Why don't we do this? Simply cost.
And this is where the real problem starts to emerge. In assuming that people will do these horrific acts, and that you can't really do much until they happen, in order to be "safe" you need the massive burden of a police state. Post-911 this message has hit home. People complain about their freedoms being eroded but largely accept this because they believe there is no other way to be "safe". So freedoms are restricted and you build the enormously expensive monstrosity of security apparatus.
The problem is this: that a system based on freedom works only while people police themselves. Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. When people think of themselves as only free to do what they please, and refuse to respect the consequences of exercising that freedom, a society is forced to remove that freedom. Because it is simply impossible for any outside person to judge every nuance of why someone exercises a freedom. So everything is banned across the board. Ten responsible gun owners who hunt rabbits lose their rifles along with the one who looks down the barrel to see if it is loaded. Or thousands no longer see their relatives off at the airport gate because it's possible for someone to take advantage of this (even though the 911 hijackers had proper tickets). Nail cutters were banned along with box cutters. It's too hard to police every individual case, so you rule broadly.
Police are not the first responders. Not really. The first check on your actions is internal. A strong conscience, a strong sense of honor and duty. A strong revulsion towards evil. When those checks begin to erode, there's not a army in the world that can keep the peace.
Outlawing guns won't work because you don't stop the evil and determined intentions. Arming every last citizen doesn't work either because, beyond the bounds of common sense and the possibility of accidents, it's too costly to do this properly. We need to stop this evil closer to the source, even if we cannot fully stamp it out of the world.
And that takes a determined, unified society. America has changed. We all see the values shifting. Many hail this as progress, many decry this as doom. Perhaps it is the immigrants coming in with different values, but my sense is that far more immigrants understand what it means to be American better than the natives, having come from more repressive, more restrictive societies. The freedom to critique the government and start a business are of profound importance to people who were jailed for the one and taxed into oblivion for the other. They are taken for granted for those who have never known anything else.
American is changing internally. Late warnings include the growth of a welfare state to support increasing amounts of those not working, the obsession with putting every last detail of your life online in the hope of being "famous" (nearly every child wants to be famous, it seems, and many never grow up), we're far more casual in everyday interactions (remember when we wore suits every time we left the house?), and the public discourse is littered with obscenity and crass sexuality.
These are all among many evidences of the breakdown of self-discipline: neglecting the pride of self-sufficiency, forgetting dignity for the allure of popularity, intensely conscious of our own importance and neglectful of anyone else's, and oblivious to the notion of sanctity and sacredness of anything in life especially for public consumption. Especially the value of life itself. When only the "me" matters, nothing else will.
We forget that the government is "us". It enforces our will, but our will drives it for our purposes. There is no outside entity called "government" that we can take money from, or pay to autonomously take care of what we want. We forget that the police are "us". They are an extension of our desire for law and order and protection from those who breach them. But the police come from our ranks. The more we keep our eyes open for outside threats, the more we stick up for our neighbor viewing their lives as valuable as our own, the more we police ourselves and prevent us from carrying out the furtive desires of our heart when no one else is looking, the less the police have to do, the less intrusive they need to be, and the safer and happier everyone is.
But this means we are all involved. This then means that we all have a common vision as to how society should look and what our parts are. Which is all predicated on a common moral and ethical framework.
A rational society is defined as one that can perpetuate itself forever -- that can last without needing to change how it looks and operates. Crucial to a rational society is a common moral framework and worldview. But as we sink into a world that prizes tolerance above meaningful substance, as we cease to recognize the central moral authority that derives from our detailed understanding (and not just a vague sense) of a Creator, and as we put ourselves up in His place thinking ourselves central to our own little universe, the society becomes irrational.
For a people to exist and thrive there has to be something unifying them. It must be above each man because each man must by necessity recognize its authority over them personally. Anything that comes from our ranks won't do because each of us has our own peculiar sense of right and wrong. No human created philosophy can hope to be universal because there is always someone who will disgree and refuse it.
When every man, to one extent or another, considers himself his own god, there is no hope that the situation will do anything else but deteriorate. Human ingenuity combined with evil determination cannot be defeated by anti-gun laws. Arming everyone is simply not feasible and will make for a miserable society while granting more opportunity for someone to betray trust and commit evil.
Lastly, we have to start believing again in evil. We have consigned so many despicable acts to sterile and clinical terminology, struggling to determine root causes, all because we cling to this incessant desire that all men are created as neutral if not in fact good people. So it must be the environment that changes them. It must be some internal misfiring that makes someone who is inherently good commit murder.
But it is wishful thinking. We're not inherently good, nor do you really have to teach a baby how to do something bad. You have to teach them to control it, to love good and to fight the evil. Bad comes naturally. Good takes practice.
People who escaped the Holocaust and many other holocausts the world, and many who escape more modern problems in Latin America or Africa or Asia, have an easier time believing in evil than we do. It's a living thing for them. Apart from Christ, the civilized societies forget quickly and succumb to a lie that is their undoing. The great British Empire was instrumental in stamping out much of the slave trade in one century, but in the next it waffled on moral responsibility, particularly on German ambition, consigned the world to unprecedented bloodshed, and has since been stripped of most distinctions apart from a bloated welfare state and health care death paths.
A rational society is one that incentivizes doing good, loving your neighbor as yourself, fostering the conditions that allow that decision to be properly made in the heart apart from laws. As a last resort it too de-incentivizes doing evil through punishments meant not for fairness but a deterrent that appeals to an evil-doers sense of self-preservation. But it requires common acceptance of a universal moral law, which requires common acceptance of a universal moral lawgiver, someone who does not come from our ranks but has the prerogative to dictate and the authority to enforce a moral law. It also requires trust that final justice will be done apart from any efforts of our own.
Consider this: that these examples of evil have one thing in common. They are determined to cause pain and misery; they may even take pride and satisfaction from it. They make make headlines. It may simply be seeing the pain. But they generally put the gun to their head last because they believe in their heart that this it will be over. They can cause as much destruction as they want, and then after that last trigger its all over. They go out with a bang, leaving what they want, escaping what they don't.
Think about it: at its heart, this is entirely a "me" centered act. Impress my pain and power on others, and protect myself from the consequences. Such suicide shows itself as an act of self-preservation more often than contemplative remorse.
Adam Lanza is not far removed from Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Goering. The apparent difference is magnitude of the horror. Perhaps the real difference is simply opportunity.
Galatians 6:7 Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.
The beauty and radical nature of the Hebrew law in ancient times was that even the king was answerable to God. In modern times we talk about constitional monarchies (where the king answers to the people) or even constitutional democracies (where the representatives answer to the people), but this depends on the people being sound judges which they are not.
If we all lived every day under the shadow of coming judgment would we dare to commit such overt sins as we do? Would we dare to commit the more commonplace "victimless crimes" we do daily?
1 Pet 4:17 For it is time for judgment to begin with the household of God; and if it begins with us first, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God? 18 And if it is with difficulty that the righteous is saved, what will become of the godless man and the sinner?
But for this to happen, we ought to be rushing to tell people, rushing to help them believe, and praying for them. Instead of locked in our ivory towers, pretending that the world is as nice as we think we are, until its our sons and daughters being carried out of what used to be a safe, innocent place.
We have outsourced our responsibilities, not simply as citizens outsourcing to a government, but God-fearing lights of the world outsourced to our churches and pastors. And we are reaping the rewards. The light is going out. And as it goes out we find ourselves more and more at the mercy of a darkness that lives in the hearts of each one of us.
John 3:16 “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. 18 He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. 20 For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. 21 But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.”
2 Tim 3:1 But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
When we cast away the common sense of a just and sovereign God, we become free to cast away our sense of evil in ourselves. In seeing ourselves as primarily good, we remove our natural restrictions and so open the floodgates to a world of evil. Unable to properly tell one from the other, we simply scratch our heads in confusion when these things happen. This past century has known evil beyond anything imagined in history, at the same time that God disappeared from public view faster than at any other time. We are simply becoming the latest iteration.
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