The Face of the Enemy
I avoided watching television this weekend. I didn’t think I’d be able to stand the stock phrases, the helpless tears, or the journalists losing track of themselves in order to grab useless interviews with traumatized 8 year olds. (I needn’t add “shame on them.” I suspect that, deep down, they’re already ashamed.)
Most of all, I couldn’t tolerate the politicians, celebrities and commentators using the slaughter of innocents to promote their pet causes. It’s not about guns: Connecticut has very tough gun laws. It’s not about the culture: Hitler enjoyed watching Disney’s Snow White. Put your ever-so-urgent issues back in your pockets and let the mourning bury their children.
When, prior to writing this, I checked on the commentators I respect, I found, with no surprise, that Charles Krauthammer, speaking on the Fox Special Report panel, had said best what little there is to say:
The first thing I think we have to say is: in trying to look at this or analyze this requires a huge amount of humility. The true factors that we do not know often — even after these events are analyzed and thought through, we really don’t know. This is the problem of evil and it’s been struggled with forever.
The problem of evil, right. Whenever my fellow Christians talk about Satan — the devil, the enemy, the adversary — I always get a little uncomfortable. Difficult enough for a cultural cove like myself to pierce the veil of sophistication in order to accept a personal God. Much harder to think of evil as having a will and consciousness of its own. But as I’ve said before, whether or not the devil exists, the world behaves exactly as if he does. And I know of only one valid response to that:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.
Without those two commandments — and unless we see all our scriptures, all our philosophies, all our actions in the light of those commandments — our religions are worthless, our politics are meaningless, our laws are helpless, our good will means nothing.
Without those two commandments, the world belongs to the enemy.
– the subject of Evil is raised, it is dismissed. Term now only used in politics.
Hey, here’s a crazy idea: Instead of making 100s of laws to protect unborn children, maybe GOP politicians could work on 1 or 2 to protect actual children.
100′s of laws? I can see why you call yourself cynical. When our dear leader can’t seem to muster the moral courage to renounce partial birth abortion (you know…actual children being born), your expectations that we can magically create new laws to protect children without addressing the root causes, the culture of death we seem to celebrate in this country, your ideas really are crazy. Maybe could start by being consistent in your desire to protect children…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistent_life_ethic
An acorn isn’t an oak tree. There’s a difference.
An acorn has everything the oak tree will ever be within itself. Size is not the determining factor for human existence.
You equate a blob of cells with a fully grown person. I don’t, and it isn’t my religious or non-religious view that concludes that. You are entitled to your view on the matter, except when you try to force it on others. Got it?
@ Cynical Wonder
“You are entitled to your view on the matter, except when you try to force it on others. Got it?”
Oh how I wish liberals would take their own argument and apply it to things like gun control, healthcare, and every other aspect of our personal lives they seek control.
@TPM. The analogy you are attempting to make is a false one. No one is talking about taking away anyone’s guns. I think what most people are trying to do is have a rational conversation about is how best do we keep these weapons out of the hands of people like Adam Lanza? We took measures to keep planes out of the hands of people who would fly them into buildings and kill people, why are guns different?
Art Chance said with regard to his gun collection “The fact that I want and like them is a perfectly valid reason for high capacity magazines, and I have lots of them in various calibers.”
Are the lives of these precious children the price we all have to pay for Mr. Chance to indulge himself just because he can?
If reasonable gun owners have to endure a little inconvenience in obtaining their new shiny object that seems to be a small price to pay.
@Cynical Wonder
Oh stop parroting the mainstream media with the “trying to have a conversation” BS already. People have been talking about gun control for decades and your side has been losing. Support for more gun laws has dropped in the US as it has become apparent that people cannot always rely upon police protection and that stricter laws just breed more violence. The Dem’s support for the last assault weapons ban likely cost them the 2000 election, hopefully they haven’t forgotten this. The conversation you are trying to have is an old and ongoing one, 20 deaths out of 350 million population does not make for a new rational argument, only one based on emotional blackmail and hysteria.
Also stop with the “precious children” garbage. I’ll bet more kids were killed in car wrecks in 1 hour than died in that shooting. Furthermore I’d rather have my child die in childhood than grow up to live in a country without rights. The rights of all are more important than the lives of any. As far as 9/11 goes, that’s another classic example of government over-reaction. 3,000 people died in that incident, equivalent to 1 month of US traffic fatalities, and yet we now have warranties wiretapping, indefinite detention, government sanctioned torture, molestation at airports, two wars, and on and on. I was 12 years old when 9/11 happened, and I knew even then that I feared the response of my own government infinitely more than the terrorists.
The problem with your argument is that it is a slippery slope. Banning the things you suggest will not stop the next mass shooting. When the next deranged individual doesn’t have “high capacity” magazines he’ll just bring more smaller ones, then when someone can only buy 6 shooters you’ll go on to ban those. When the last ban obviously didn’t work people just push for another more restrictive one, in the emotion fueled hysteria to “do something”. It’s a ratchet that only clicks one direction and the ant-constitution crowd knows this, which is why they push for incremental bans. Both England and Australia lost their gun rights in the hysteria after a single mass shooting event, and now their politicians talk about banning pointy ended knives.
C Wonder–Priceless! Still trying to understand your logic.— Telling others to not force their view on you, when you are trying to force your view on them.
AH yes, and you are still a nut.. justify that leg spreading now.
An acorn represents the future oak tree and symbolises the beauty of nature and God in the cycle of all life.
Abortion is murder; legalized murder but still murder. When murder is legal what can possibly be illegal?
Abortion isn’t murder. Murder applies to people, and a fetus is not a person. But even if it were the rights of the woman are primary. One person does not have the right to hijack another person’s body and use it as an incubator against her will. If she doesn’t want to be pregnant she doesn’t have to be.
Cynical – a fetus IS a living human being once it is fully formed (which is about half way through gestation. Until it is fully formed with nerves and even possible sentience, it is still the potential for human life. Early term embryos under 7 weeks of gestation have a high risk of miscarrying (or not even implanting). It is only in this early stage, where I believe the mother has more rights over her body than the embryo. After that, the embryo/fetus should have full rights to live unless it threatens the life of the mother.
I agree with you, Cynical, that conception and the first few weeks after is NOT the same as a fully formed human life. And I would also agree that during the first 7 weeks or so, there is good chance that the embryo will not implant or will miscarry. However, after 2 to 2 1/2 months, the forming fetus becomes a living being. And while it is still technically only the potential of a complete human life, it should (for all intents and purposes) have the chance to live at that point since, barring any tragedies, it should come to full term. I am one of these people who would NEVER have an abortion myself, but I believe in the first trimester that people should be able to choose. After that first trimester, however, it should only be allowed if it is to save the life of the woman. The problem is that the left has made it so that even partial birth abortion is acceptable to them. They have no qualms killing viable fetuses.
Actually a human fetus most certainly is a human. It is a stage of development different than yours. The day a human fetus develops into something other than human, you might have an argument. Until then the comments about a fetus not being a human are total nonsense.
Oh I’m sorry but by that standard aren’t the children who were killed just blobs of cells? Please explain to me the difference between a pre birth human and a post birth human aside from the fact that they’ve been born. If you make the argument that being dependent/attached to another makes them less of a human maybe you outta explain to me why conjoined twins have any rights.
Not to mention that this argument is just getting plain old. Doesn’t it disturb you lefties that your justification for abortion is exactly the same justification used by the Nazi’s (Jews aren’t people, they’re vermin), slave owners (Blacks aren’t people, they’re apes) and ancient civs (women can’t reason therefore they’re not as human as men). Your crime is appalling and the reasons you use to justify it have been utilized by some of the most evil people in history, you amongst them.
I agree with your comment about so much emphasis being placed on unborn children. Unfortunately the GOP is not known for its care of the already born or the parents of such. Mental health is an enormous problem because of the stigma attached to it. I have heard stories about there being no place to put mentally disturbed. There should be some sort of hospice for those individuals, staffed by medical people and a few policemen. I can understand parents being “at their wits end” when caring for them. I taught several disturbed kids whose parents refused to acknowledge that anything was wrong. Unless they give their permission, nothing can be done. There is so much emphasis on sparing the feelings etc of the mentally ill, that no one remembers the danger to the whole world.Of course, school districts always think of the cost of possible lawsuits.
I also avoided all television except sports this weekend. But even with my basic knowledge of events, I can count 4 broken laws before any shooting started. Unless you are talking about treatment of the dangerously mentally-ill, I’m not interested in adding to that list.
There is only ONE way to eliminate public school violence.
It is not what you think.
From another site:
“A 20 year-old had a couple of handguns (illegal). And, depending on the press report, had an assault weapon (illegal), automatic rifle (illegal), or machine gun (illegal). Shot his mom in the face (illegal). Stole his mom’s vehicle (illegal). Transported the gun in the vehicle (illegal) within 1,000 feet of a school (illegal). Carried it onto school property (illegal). Broke and entered (illegal). Carried a gun in a school (illegal). Discharged a firearm (illegal). Shot at people (illegal). Killed some people (illegal). Killed himself (not sure if illegal).”
Yet you and your comrades think one more law will solve things. We realize from your previous comments, that you have a rather high opinion of your own intellect. However, we also realize, via the same mechanism, that you’re slow, like most liberals. You don’t have to keep proving it.
But you will.
There’s no valid reason for high-capacity magazines. You certainly don’t need them for hunting. You don’t need them for home defense, unless you’re fighting off cartel drug lords or the zombie apocalypse. And neither of those are worth the lives of 20 first graders.
People like you and the gun lobby want to frame sensible control measures in terms of freedom. But really it is merely the convenience and pleasure of gun hobbyists who like hunting squirrels, etc. – not a glorious noble freedom – that is being preserved at the cost of these awful innocent deaths. That is no longer an equitable or desirable trade.
The fact that I want and like them is a perfectly valid reason for high capacity magazines, and I have lots of them in various calibers. The fact that lefty idiots like you don’t want me to have them is also a perfectly valid reason to have high capacity magazines. You may come and try to take mine at your leisure.
In your case, being the old codger you are, owning a gun is likely a substitute for what no longer functions between your legs. I agree with Joe Scarborough, and he’s pretty conservative, who today said on his show that:
“I knew that day that the ideologies of my past career were no longer relevant to the future that I want, that I demand for my children. Friday changed everything. It must change everything. We all must begin anew and demand that Washington’s old way of doing business is no longer acceptable. Entertainment moguls don’t have an absolute right to glorify murder while spreading mayhem in young minds across America. And our Bill of Rights does not guarantee gun manufacturers the absolute right to sell military-style, high-caliber, semi-automatic combat assault rifles with high-capacity magazines to whoever the hell they want.
It is time for Congress to put children before deadly dogmas. It’s time for politicians to start focusing more on protecting our schoolyards than putting together their next fundraiser. It’s time for Washington to stop trying to win endless wars overseas when we’re losing the war at home … For the sake of my four children and yours, I choose life and I choose change.”
The question for people like you is whether feeling like a man is more important than the lives of these precious children. Well, is it?
@cynical wonder
It’s obvious that what ever was swinging between your legs has withered and died years ago, and taken your higher brain functions with it.
You win the most ignorant slut award for PJ. How many pairs of shoes do you have? Why do you need 50+ pairs of underwear? Why do you have hundreds of containers of cosmetics, some never opened in your bathroom?? Your wrinkles are still increasing.. that money could have been used to treat the mentally ill, like yourself.
And the money you spent on the blow up doll with your mothers face could have done the same.
While we’re limiting constitutional rights in the name of “You don’t need”, let’s add a few:
you don’t need video games where heads get ripped off
you don’t need tv/movies with blood spurting everywhere
you don’t need a news media that’s allowed to publicize the name of the killer
you don’t need a news media that gives all sorts of details about this crime as though waving it in front of every potential future maniac.
No need for high capacity magazines or “military style” weapons huh?
Tell that to the people who used those very weapons to defend their businesses and lives from mobs of looters during the Rodney King riots. When law and order breaks down a citizen may well find himself confronting dozens if not hundreds of people trying to steal his property, rape and kill his family, murder him for his race or creed, or some combination of the above. A weapon capable of killing large numbers of people quickly from a distance is essential in that situation.
And also, lets not forget that the primary purpose of the second amendment was to protect the citizens from the potential tyranny of their own government, or a foreign aggressor. It has almost nothing to do with hunting. I think that a “military style” weapon is highly appropriate when the intention of the law is that a person wielding it may be forced into a military style situation. And before you try and feed me a line of tripe that armed citizens are not effective against modern military I encourage you to examine the result of Vietnam, the last two powers to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, or any of the current and recent revolutions in the middle east.
You really believe your little pop gun, even the one with the high capacity magazine, will be effective in the situations you describe? My guess is that the military/government, if they wished to do so, could vaporize you in your seat this very second. You wouldn’t know what hit you.
@ Cynical Wonder
It’s not about a one man crusade, any small uprising without popular support will certainly be crushed. But a mass movement by a substantial fraction of the population would be very difficult to stop. There are around 300 million firearms in the private hands of around 100 million gun owners in the US. That outnumbers the military by about 100 to 1, even assuming that none of them would choose to fight on the side of the citizenry. As I said, look at military history, an insurgency by determined people fighting on their home turf is very difficult to eradicate. Even if said insurgency were to lose at least they would’ve had the opportunity to fight. For an example of what desperate people with small arms can do see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Uprising
I think I would rather go out fighting than being herded into the gas chambers thank you.
to cynical I wonder,
The assault rifles and all the high count Magazines is needed to protects us from our Government. As our founders instructed us and protected us with rights. You might like what the minority is doing to this country, but the much bigger majority are getting mad as hell.
The second amendment was not created so people can go hunting. It was created so the citizenry will not be subjected to tyranny by government. People should be able to protect themselves from tyrannical government. I am not advocating the purchase of missiles, mortars and IEDs but to be honest, the people should be able to have the same ability to fight back unencumbered should government try to take away their rights. That is the true purpose of the 2nd Amendment. Oh, and don’t throw the “militia” word around. At the time the Constitution was written, a “militia” was any group of citizens formed to protect their homeland.
Wow it’s almost like your response didn’t answer his comment as all. You just set up another straw man and knocked it right down all the while ignoring what he said. Brilliance.
I happen to live where an attack by a drug cartel is a possibility.
Cynical Wonder — I don’t need a magazine larger than 5 rounds to hunt big game. My .22 caliber squirrel rifle’s magazine holds 21 rounds. My shotgun holds 6 rounds if I remove the plug which is perfectly legal unless hunting migratory game birds. BUT, it is also my RIGHT to defend myself against all comers including an overeaching governemnt. The Second Amendment GUARANTEES me the right in writing. A large caliber semi-automatic rifle with detachable 20 and/or 30 round magazines might not GUARANTEE that right through might, but it damn sure makes me feel a hell of a lot safer, more free, less apprehensive, and less fearful of my government’s agents that I must deal with in the normal routines of my life. I cannot know how a slave feels about his/her enslavement, but I damn sure know that I don’t want to learn. This is the ONLY reason I have for high capacity magazines and it is the only one needed by free-thinking men.
Cynical — I do not need a magazine to hunt large game that is larger than 5 rounds. My .22 caliber squirrel rifle holds 21 rounds in the magazine. My shotgun hold 6 rounds if I remove the plug, which is legal unless I am hunting migratory waterfowl. The ONLY reason that I have for owning a high powered semi-automatic rifle with 20 or 30 round magazines is that I do not want my government to enslave me. I may not be able to fight them all, but I will not go quietly into that dark night. This is the only reason that I need according to the Constitution. This is the only reason that I will ever put forth. Outlaw firearms, and you only make outlaws of law-abiding men and women. Is this what you want? To CREATE a group of outlaws by fiat? Are you really and truly THAT sick?
There are no laws that protect unborn children.
BTW, you know mass school shootings in which children were the targets really didn’t start happening until after Rove v Wade? Just a coincidence one supposes.
If I had time and resources to chase down the statistics, I would love to compare the length of prison sentences handed to women convicted of killing their (already born) children before and after 1973. I suspect the average sentence length has decreased…even if we count “mental-health facility” as “prison” for the sake of comparison.
In an upscale, college educated neighborhood like the one where this ocurred, the odds are pretty good that a lot of those kids who were killed had “siblings” that never saw the light of day.
Heather, I’m pretty confident that would be the case.
Actually Bill, that’s not quite true. If a THIRD party kills an unborn child against the wishes (assumed or explicit) of the mother, then that’s murder.
Yup. If some mook in a drive by in Los Angeles happens to shoot a woman “with child” and kill her and the child, he’s going down for two counts of murder. Even if the woman was on the way to the abortion clinic. Were such a case actually to come up, I’d be curious to see the knots the Left twists themselves in when the defense tries to have the murder charge against the child dismissed.
Hey here you go: we’re proposing the Respect for Life Act and the Bring Back The Cuckoo’s Nest Act
Can’t let a crisis go to waste, right?
What would you suggest? I’m just “dying” to know your solution since you’re one of the utter morons who thinks more paper laws and more regulation is the answer to everything, but morality need not apply.
Unfortunately, your humanist way of three generations now is reaping what it sows from classrooms, to spectacularly failed Presidents, to Wall Street. Life is is cheap, morals are what we each wish them to be, and you better get used to it, numb nuts.
This is the world you helped to create and it only gets worse from here on out, cynic.
So tell us OH SUPERIOR ONE how does tearing a perfectly viable human being from its mother’s womb and killing it differ in actuality from waiting a few years to do it? What’s your problem exactly? The world’s desperately overcrowded and humans are the cause of all bad weather that kills so many people. No? Isn’t elimating a bunch of them a good thing? If the media deigned to make an issue out of every partial birth abortion, and called for banning all abortions, then where would you stand? You’re not cynical, you’re an imbecile.
“…maybe GOP politicians could work on 1 or 2 to protect actual children.”
Such as what? You’re so good at complaining, what do you think would have helped actual children in this case?
Well, Cynical Wonder after a weekend seeing stupid ill-informed postings I give you the ribbon for first place. Everytime the right tries to uphold the laws that are already in place the left sees to it that the bad guys walk. To confuse the value of upholding an unborn childs right to live with adding more laws to protect the living is simply idiotic. You are a dumbass.
Cynical, Thank you for admitting the obvious–anti abortion activists are not seeking to protect “embryos” or “fetuses(from the latin for offspring, BTW). They are seeking “to protect unborn children” as you,perhaps unwittingly, acknowledged. Whether prior or subsequent to birth, protection of children should be a “no-brainer”. And yet we ignore a modern day slaughter of the innocents which makes Herod’s attempt seem tame by comparison. Spare me the sanctimonious posturing until the moral evil of abortion is finally seen for what it is!
Here’s a “sane response” to your “crazy idea.” Laws may guide the law-abiding but they do not protect children, or anyone else, from evil acts; they merely offer punishment for the lawbreaker.
If someone chooses to do evil, whether though rage or insanity, no law (by itself) can protect the intended victim. And when the armed police are not present in the course of an evil act …. an armed and capable citizen is the only viable option that might save the lives of the innocent.
Are you really that ignorant? Or is your comment some kind of sick joke? There are hundreds of laws to protect everyone. All the laws in the world don’t work when people chose to break them. I hope you were kidding, otherwise that was the most asinine comment I’ve heard today.
What day does a child recieve his right to life? Since maturity at birth can vary, what litmus test can we use to test whether the “blob of cells” has earned it’s right to live? Who is qualified to decide when a “blob of cells” becomes a person, with rights of it’s own?
I’m not jerking your chain. I really want to know.
Bravo, Andrew.
A very thorough, very cautious comparison with this case might be of some help:
“‘It is a tragedy for Norway, and for us. But I believe it is also a tragedy for Breivik. The first time I saw Breivik coming into the hall, I did not see a monster. I saw a deeply lonely man.’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2156530/Anders-Behring-Breivik-rare-forms-Aspergers-Tourette-s-syndromes-says-Norways-leading-psychiatrist.html
Very cautious though. And I consider it important to also read Bookworm about Ido in order to not jump into false generalizations about all kinds of autism. Considering gross therapeutic mistakes.
I, too, couldn’t bear to watch the news this weekend. After a while, it always degenerates into the same talking points. Do we need more guns, or fewer guns? Do we need more laws, or do we need to enforce the laws that are already on the books? Can you blame guns, or is the culture to blame? You know the drill and sadly these discussions seem to be getting all too frequent these days. Ever since the the mass shootings that wounded Gabby Giffords and killed several others, there seems to have been an explosion of mass or multiple shootings. After a while you become numb to it, wondering if it will ever end.
That all stopped last Friday. When you lose 20 kids aged 6 and 7, plus six adults trying to defend them, there is something diabolically wrong with America. Yes, I said it. There IS something wrong with America. I don’t know if it’s guns or what we see in the media that influences kids or just a terrible evil that’s in our hearts that is to blame, but it’s there, folks. And we’d better find some answers, fast, because I’m seeing more of these shootings in the news today, not fewer.
It’s too easy to blame guns. That’s the coward’s way out. Blame a tool for all your failings as a society and as a culture. When people don’t have God, religion, or simple human compassion in their lives anymore, when they reject morality and don’t see the need anymore in our culture to even be civil to their fellow human beings, do you wonder that we can produce animals like the one that killed all those people last Friday? Just look at what kids today see on television, the movies, computer games, or on the Internet and tell me humanity, in general, looks better today than it did 50 years ago. As humans, our humanity is supposed to be evolving for the better. At least that’s the hope. Yet a case could be made that we’re acting worse today on a global basis than we did back in the days leading up to World War II. When you see how society is up to its ears in trouble both here and around the world, something has gone terribly wrong. And we all know what the 1930s lead to. World War II.
So what’s the answer? Well, if people really want some answers, they are going to have to look at our society, our mass-media culture, and our government in its totality. And I honestly don’t think we have the strength or the will to do that. More people will die because there is a sickness in our hearts and minds in this country, not because one state has more guns than another. So until we have that honest conversation, I urge you to take a look as this video. It was the speech Billy Graham gave after the Oklahoma City bombing in the 1990s. The message he gave back then could easily be given today and it would make perfect sense, especially when he talks about hatred and evil. If you want, you can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yz15zXjZDk
If this Lanza character only had karate lessons instead of an assault rifle, he could never have done what he did.
To all the gun enthusiasts who are posting on these discussions, I say this:
None of you can be trusted not to kill. None of you can be trusted never to freak out. And you know that yourselves. If you came home and found your wife in bed with another man at a moment that a gun was nearby, would you have enough self-control not to use it?
We’re all sinners–or potential sinners.
McVeigh killed 19 kids and 149 adults with a fertilizer truck.
Do you have a point to make? As was immediately pointed out, a gun is no more effective than a bomb or a can of gas.
Your observation would also apply to those whom you would sprinkle with the pixie dust of authority as being allowed to have weapons as well. Or do you think the firearms genie can be re-bottled somehow?
Learn to speak for yourself and avoid projection.
sinz54,
What you fail to report is; was that man there in bed against your wife’s will?
Yes there is a killer in all of us. What will always hold that killer in check is the fear of, “consequence”. In this case, the killer was on a kill mission with a suicide final outcome. There is nothing holding that killer in check and the seeds to his evil planning began way out of everybodies reach.
Get a grip man.
The same day this guy killed 20 children with a gun a guy in China killed 22 children with a knife. Those people are only allowed one child so these children are the most prescious possesions to people. And these attacks has been escalating in that country of late.
Is it the knife or the culture?
It’s insanity.
“None of you can be trusted not to kill”? “None of you can be trusted never to freak out”? I could say the same thing to every law-enforcement and political agent in this country–and moreover, to every law-enforcement and political institution, AS INSTITUTIONS. The scary difference is, they’re usually gormless enough not to realize that about themselves. Pardon me if such asymmetry of force seems more potentially deadly to me than does the occasional random lunatic.
The even scarier thing is the statist vermin who have crawled out of the woodwork, proposing we invest all power to harm in these merely human authorities, brazenly and repellently confident that if such institutions and officers DO forget themselves, it’ll be in service of their own ends, against those Untermenschen whose politics (and hides) they don’t care for.
Given the same scenario of me walking in on my wife in bed with another man without OWNING a gun, I kill the son of a bitch with the closest blunt object. Dumbass.
“None of you can be trusted not to kill.”
Funny, I feel the same way about the government. How many innocent people have been butchered by their own governments in the 20th century alone? 250 Million at a conservative estimate I believe. If a politician doesn’t trust me enough to own a gun, I certainly don’t trust them with the power of office, to aim the guns of the state at me.
http://jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/deathgc.htm#chart
sinz54, Where would you draw the line on whom to trust? Would it be Eric Holder(the man responsible for Fast&Furious that was responsible for over 3,000 deaths), the ATF, the FBI, the CIA or your local poorly trained policeman? Do you imagine that these people have some magical power to resist their natural “Killer Instincts”? Your rant is so illogical that it would be funny in a less tragic event.
We need armed security guards in our schools with no other mission than to protect the children from violence.
After we extend at least the same level of protection to our children that we accept in banks and jewelry stores we can then ruminate about philosophy.
This problem has a very do-able and effective response that can be implemented in a very short time, creating much-needed jobs. 3 guards per school at a minimum should do it.
Remove the monopoly on the means of inflicting violence from any potential malefactors who get into our schools…let them commit their suicide BEFORE they murder innocent children, not AFTER.
A gunfight is preferable to a massacre.
In the union states a guard that can be licensed to use deadly force, meaning at minimum can pass a background check, pee in a bottle, and attend at least enough police training to know techniques, tactics, and understand the force continuum, is going to have a minimum loaded cost of $150K/yr. Throw in some administrative and supervisory costs and your three guards per school translates into about a half-million dollars in security staff costs for each school. In the non-union states the costs would be half to two-thirds that, but then those states typically have only half to two-thirds the ability to pay. Ready to put that tab on your property tax bill?
“Ready to put that tab on your property tax bill?”
Yes.
If the next killing spree counts 3 or 4 dead,(not counting the dead criminal), instead of a dozen or more.
How ’bout you?
No, I’m not willing to give another dime to the government run indoctrination centers. I’d like a voucher program so that people with children can choose privately and responsibly run schools that educate rather than indoctrinate and where at least some of the staff could carry.
I don’t think the armed security staff would be much more effective than the cops since they certainly can’t be everywhere, it doesn’t take long to do an awful lot of damage with any repeating weapon, and the perps usually are there in a suicide mission anyway.
What I don’t really get, though I have some ideas about it, is why, when in comparison to the peak ‘Boomer years of the late ’50 through the ’60 there were far more adolescent males as a percentage of the population and probably in raw numbers than today, there weren’t these incidents. We were a much more rural Country then so more of the society were armed, toy guns and gunplay were very common, on TV every night, boys wore cap guns and holsters to school, boys played cowboys and indians, cops and robbers, and “soldier” constantly, always with cap guns, sometimes with BB guns, and most boys had BB guns. During the various hunting seasons, probably half the cars in my HS parking lot had one or more guns in it. It ain’t guns causing the shooting incidents.
“No, I’m not willing to give another dime to the government run indoctrination centers. I’d like a voucher program so that people with children can choose privately and responsibly run schools that educate rather than indoctrinate and where at least some of the staff could carry.”
I understand your position, which is why I have stressed that the guards have NO OTHER JOB than to protect the children.
The other aspect to bear in mind is that schools are run by the counties, cities and states, so this would be a local rather than a Federal initiative…all we need Washington DC is to GTF out of the way and let us implement the program.
“I don’t think the armed security staff would be much more effective than the cops since they certainly can’t be everywhere, it doesn’t take long to do an awful lot of damage with any repeating weapon, and the perps usually are there in a suicide mission anyway.”
Have you been paying attention at all to how these horrors play out?
In the vast majority of cases, the killer(s), kill as many as they can in the time that they are allowed by armed police response delay. Then once the cops show up and the killer(s) no longer enjoy a monopoly on the means of inflicting dedaly force, they suicide.
Armed guards in the school will shorten the amount of time that the killer(s) enjoy such a monopoly since most school buildings can be traversed on foot withing ten minutes at a walk…less if you’re running.
In the cold mathematics of these things, let the defectoids eat their own bullets after killing only 3 or 4 rather than after after murdering 12…or 20…or more.
“What I don’t really get, though I have some ideas about it, is why, when in comparison to the peak ‘Boomer years of the late ’50 through the ’60 there were far more adolescent males as a percentage of the population and probably in raw numbers than today, there weren’t these incidents. We were a much more rural Country then so more of the society were armed, toy guns and gunplay were very common, on TV every night, boys wore cap guns and holsters to school, boys played cowboys and indians, cops and robbers, and “soldier” constantly, always with cap guns, sometimes with BB guns, and most boys had BB guns. During the various hunting seasons, probably half the cars in my HS parking lot had one or more guns in it. It ain’t guns causing the shooting incidents.”
This is all a very good line of discussion to engage in AFTER we have put the guards in the schools to safeguard our children, y’know?
What good would they do on the play ground when a sniper nut decided to kill a few from several hundred yards away? Don’t you people understand that evil is inherent in humans and that the only way to approach it is to prepare for it as best as the terrain and economy allows. That would mean doing the same thing that the airline pilots did and have volunteers within those institutions take rigorous firearm training along with defensive tactics to be available during any attended activity as the first line of defense until law enforcement people can arrive. Look at all of the laws this nut broke in committing his heinous crime. Did any of them ameliorate the severity of his act? No matter the intent, putting restrictions on gun ownership for the responsible citizen is futile. Imagine the opposite law, that ALL TEACHERS must know how to use and carry a firearm while at school! Do you think for one minute that this nut job would have gone to any school? Until we understand that evil is ALWAYS present and prepare for it we will always be reactive to horrible events like this one and be tempted to pass stupid and useless laws that take away the rights of the many to try and stop the few.
“What good would they do on the play ground when a sniper nut decided to kill a few from several hundred yards away?”
Probably very little, but the fact that some defectoid might resort to driving a truck-bomb into the cafeteria at lunch time isn’t really a valid excuse not to do what we know will work in the majority of these hideous crimes…unless you really don’t want to do anything at all in the first place.
“Don’t you people understand that evil is inherent in humans and that the only way to approach it is to prepare for it as best as the terrain and economy allows.”
Yes, I understand that humans are evil, and I also understand that humans are slothful and often need to be goaded into doing what they should do.
I’m not (yet) advocating minefields in the landscaping and anti-aircraft batteries on top of the school buildings to deter 9/11-type aerial attacks, because these are not,(yet), what we have seen as the most common type of weapon used in committing these crimes.
to Bilgeman: My thoughts exactly! Stop the eternal debate on the use of guns, and start protecting the children. We can never be sure of who might be a perpetrator of obscene tragedy. But we can do much better at preventing them from getting to the most vulnerable and innocent members of society. I expect there will be a great deal of ‘blow-back’ in tnis regard, but I say we need security as well as Athletic managers, coaches ,faculty and staff. Certify a vet and make him,or her, responsible for safety and security. I would much prefer to spend money to this purpose than another assistant administrator, to the assistant administrator. (I know whereof I speak, being a retired, and really tired, High School teacher).
It saddens and amazes me that I even have to argue for this common-sense and pragmatic initiative.
I work at sea, and when the hull is breached and we are taking on water, the proper response is to STOP the water from entering the ship, get the water that HAS gotten into the ship OUT where it belongs, and repair the hull.
We can discuss and lament the competency of shipyard welders or the merits of anti-corrosion strategies at a later time…preferably NOT when we are sitting around in a life-raft and trying not to puke on each other while waiting for rescue.
This nation, in toto and individually, has apparently become just too damned stupid and obsessed with irrelevancies to continue living.
“This nation, in toto and individually, has apparently become just too damned stupid and obsessed with irrelevancies to continue living.”
That’s true for Western civilization as a whole.
Since Sophie and Francis Ferdinand were shot by a lunatic anarchist back in 1914 we have been immersed in a bloodbath. Our sick society has turned to kill with special ferocity those who are more innocent: the unborn. There is a comment here that cynically seeks to provoke a reaction. Can’t you see how sick we have become? How crazy we all have become?
Death seed blind man’s greed
Poets’ starving children bleed
Nothing he’s got he really needs
Twenty first century schizoid man.
(1968, King Crimson… prophetic)
Go say anything you want. The Liberals in charge since the beginning of the 20th century has produced this massacre: I mean Liberals of the RIGHT AND OF THE LEFT.
We see more weeping in Congress and the White House now… big deal! Black Americans have been enduring a slow massacre in their neighborhoods for decades and neither black nor white politicians have done NOTHING to help. In fact they have made the problem worse. They will try to legislate peace and security after they have worked hard to destroy the Christian churches and the real rule of law. Good luck!
Knowledge is a deadly friend
When no one sets the rules.
The fate of all mankind I see
Is in the hands of fools.
(1968, King Crimson, taken from Epitaph)
Keep electing morons while destroying the moral base of civilization. Then cry and be shocked all you want. The bloodbath is very likely to continue until we all become again a Nation Under God. These are the fruits of the Summer of Love: “kill, kill, kill” that is the creed of demons Democrats and Republicans have elected to live under.
People are talking about this guy’s act as if it happened on some form of auto-pilot. He’s mentally ill, he’s a nutter, he’s evil, etc. The fact of the matter is that he was fully aware of what he was doing and consciously chose his target for effect. For all the talk of this happening all too frequently, the fact is that nobody had ever gone into an elemntary school and massacred a classroom full of 6 year-olds before. It seems clear to me that this guy made a conscious choice to jump the shark, if you will. To escalate. Describing this as senseless is wrong. It wasn’t senseless to him, but deliberately chosen, and if you accept that premise, then the only question is why. I maintain he did this to trigger exactly what has occurred, a demand for gun control, something that was as predictable as the sunrise. That’s why he upped the ante and went after a classroom full of little kids.
Ummm … I guess you never heard about Beslan …
Good point. Totally forgot that one. These things are happening all over the world and with all types of weapons. The libs in their own way are trying to explain this in their own PC and limited way. There is no way to stop all demented and evil acts. I learned today that in this country in 1928 some crazy murderer attacked a school and blew up 30 students using dynamite.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103186662
1927 “The total death toll in the Bath School disaster was 45, including Kehoe. Thirty-eight of those killed were children. Huffman remembers one family that lost three children that day.”
no guns, a bomb blast
Thanks for your thoughtful post, Mr Klavan.
“Without those two commandments, the world belongs to the enemy. ”
Two exquisitly simple commandments: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.” Elegant and simple. Beautiful.
I, too, averted my attention from all the media as it felt obscene and shameful. I know it dehumanizes me to dehumanize the folks who toil away in Big Media. Undoubtedly, it is wrong for me to objectify those human beings who comprise the media, but do they possess not a shred of introspection? Of human decency? Big media has become a disease. The plague.
Very good observation. I agree wholeheartedly.
Janie, your comment about the two commandants is apt but one has to prepare for the people who do not live by those commandants. This is what Congress is about to do with some poorly passed gun control law. America used to be a nation built of independent tough minded people who were “Can Do” people. Now we are a nation of “Who is going to look after me” people. The answer to our protection lies within each of us but we have to be allowed the tools to accomplish it. We cannot legislate evil away.
Those who follow the Love imperative may be caricaturized and ignored by the “mainstream,” but they won’t be forgotten. Especially by their neighbors.
http://vimeo.com/53866901#at=0
“Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share.”
1 Timothy 6:18
http://vimeo.com/55639055
If we were to ban mass education then the people that would do these things would not have a convenient target.
http://www.voxday.blogspot.com/2012/12/homeschool-or-die-part-562.html
Wow Ralph, what a good idea. How about any football game? Or how about any shopping mall? Throw in a parade or two and then consider all the churches. It will happen in all of these places and some you have not even imagined yet. How about 9/11? Did anyone see that coming? Should we not build any more skyscrapers? You are taking the reactive approach instead of the proactive approach which requires us to expect it and to take all sensible actions to lessen the impact. But we cannot prevent ALL evil events.
Good posts here.
Libertyship46 and Catino, I agree wholeheartedly.
Andrew Klavan, you have stated the nub of the problem as well as the solution, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Unfortunately in our materialistic and mindless culture we worship not the Creator of all things but only our base appetites and desires.
One more thing.
In every state in this country there is at least one organization that is trying to care for unwanted and cast off children. The Boys and Girls Ranches are the best in my state. These organizations always need more resources. Seek them out and give to them as you are able.
Light a candle and don’t curse the darkness.
Yes, thanks. The 2nd commandment would instruct us to get involved with others as we would our own affairs. I fear we have lost a generation of kids with the break up of the family. It’s not too late, but we must get involved with kids and teach them, among other things, these two commandments. I’m doing it through Cub Scouts. There are many ways to get involved.
Ah yes, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” vs the Rove-Alinsky “divide and conquer” political, and to some degree cultural, world we inhabit.
To belabor the obvious, this was a horrible, horrible event, and the more you think about it, the worse it gets. Gunwise, politically, it is a near perfect storm of a troubled young man, shooting his mother with her own guns, especially the Bushmaster, and then doing far worse with them with the hundreds of rounds of ammunition that she had apparently cached. You don’t have to be a weatherman to know how the winds will blow on this one, especially since it is beginning to happen regularly.
Obama made it clear last night in a damned good speech (although I’m not sure how many people you could get to acknowledge that at PJM) that change must happen to stop such things. Yes, most of us know that whatever legislation passes will NOT stop all such events, but some legislation almost certainly will happen, regarding both firearms and the treatment of mental illness.
I don’t claim to have the answers here, but clearly the status quo will be deemed unacceptable.
Dwight, Yes It was a good speech. Yet we both know and so does everybody else that where Obama is coming from and where he is going will do nothing because he and the left will refuse to address where the poison comes from.
Andrew Klavan addressed it perfectly.
Does that mean he will not tell the nation to repent? He certainly quoted a lot of scripture and it was the most Christian-leaning speech I have heard him make. Hell, even the free-thinking Lincoln became more (at least openly) religious as the bloodbaths grew. “Where the poison comes from” is pretty vague. Please be more specific. IMHO there are a LOT of factors combining here, which is why it is NOT a simple problem to solve or legislate.
How many local, county, state, national, and any zone the government wishes to designate, gun related laws are on the books now? How many laws are there regulating personal behavior which is not favorable to others in those jurisdictions?
Come on D-White, pick some numbers.
Well, Dwight, I don’t know if it was a good speech or not because when I see the lying communist SOB’s face on the TV, I turn it off or change the channel. I don’t know or care what lies he told. He and the other communists will try to use this incident to “re-institute” the so-called assault weapons ban. Communists never forgive and never forget so if it takes a thousand years they’ll try to restore the old Clinton Era legislation and add a few insults to the Constitution in the process.
It remains unclear whether the Bushmaster was used in the school shootings. The reports I’ve seen said it was recovered from the trunk of the car he drove to the school. In any event, the .223 Bushmaster is no more lethal than any other semi-automatic rifle of that caliber, it is just a little more “scary” looking. All the lefty reporters and politicians are prattling on about the “powerful” weapons used but actually both are at the very bottom of the pile for adequate personal defense weapons; the .223 has nothing like the penetrating power of .3n caliber hunting rifles, many of which are also semi-auto but don’t look so scary in walnut and blue, and the 9mm pistols are at or close to the minimum power for self-defense and are certainly not considered a sure knock-down weapon. Of course, under the circumstances in the school, pretty much any tube or magazine fed weapon could have killed the same number of people in the same amount of time. My old .22 Remington Nylon 66 fires just as rapidly, maybe a little more, than my .223 Ruger Mini-14 and with the close range and small bodies of women and children, the .22 would be just as deadly, though it would take longer to reload.
Well, you got that off your chest. For your violent Obama allergy, you will have to seek medical treatment, but for the “assault weapons” piece, you are saying EXACTLY what I am already telling my outraged liberal friends (and wife.) That being said, I still foresee upcoming legislation to (at a minimum) limit clip/magazine size, (won’t that be fun to even try to track down all the ones that are out there?) armed guards for schools (and won’t that cost a ton of money?) and the Chance Amendment which will provide another level of involuntary confinement for mental illness (and won’t that be pricey, too?)
Everybody will just “lose” their high capacity magazines, just like they did when they were banned before. Meanwhile, until the legislation takes effect, the price will skyrocket. Just the news that the BATF was “studying” the Saiga 12 ga. semi-automatic, magazine fed shotgun practically doubled the price.
I don’t think even the Soros Junta has the guts to try and gather up all the high-capacity mags. Even though they’re currently legal, I never show the high capacity mags for either my Mini-14 or my Saiga 12 ga. I keep the Mini-14 in nice sedate wood and blue and if it is in the truck or I’m carrying it when we’re out of town, I keep the 5 rd. in it simply because even in Alaska big magazines attract attention, especially law enforcement attention. I use my Mossberg 12 ga. pump for our “bear gun.” It’s the marine model so it is kinda black and scary but shotguns for “bear insurance” are so common here that nobody notices. My Saiga on the other hand is pretty close to the ultimate big, scary, black gun and the only time it has ever been out of the house was one day last year I’d seen the same car with dark tint and 22s cruise slowly by the house three times, so I went out on the front deck and started “cleaning my gun.” The car came by again, sped up, and was not seen again. I don’t ever use the Saiga as a bear gun or even as my primary HD weapon because I don’t trust it like I trust the Mossberg pump, but if a band of zombies ever comes down my street, I have the Saiga.
I don’t know the answer on the issue of the mentally ill being unsupervised. I don’t trust the so-call social scientists to come up with a definition or adequate parameters and I sure as Hell don’t trust the government, any government, to apply those parameters. That said, I know when I see one that there are lots of people out running free that shouldn’t be. I was working on an issue for the correctional officers union a couple of weeks ago and was at the local pre-trial facility during an arraignment session. (They’ve finally figured out that it is a LOT cheaper and easier to build a courtroom or two in the prison than to haul inmates, some of them very dangerous, back and forth to the courthouse.) There were perhaps 30 men waiting and a good third of them obviously had some sort of mental issues.
(This is going to be long and will bore most people. You should probably just leave now and hit up peopleofwallmart.com or something actually entertaining. But what the hell, I felt like writing it.)
OK… We have all heard about the horrific mass murder that took place in Connecticut last week. I’ve tried to avoid commenting on it as until now I never really had the time to read much on it, nor did I have any of the facts. As of my reading this evening, many are now in place, but there is still quite a bit left that we don’t know.
One of the things that surprised me about this was just how fast it was twisted to various political ends. First article I saw on it, ON THE DAY IT HAPPENED, was titled something like ‘Connecticut shooting shows why we need gun control now!” or some such. Another later was titled (and again, I’m approximating here as I didn’t save the links) something like “Connecticut murders shows why teachers need to be armed.”
To start off, I honestly don’t care what a person’s politics are: left, right, center, up, down whatever… If your first reaction to human misery and suffering is to see how you can force it to serve your political agenda, then you have a serious problem. You are lacking in some basic humanity. If your first impulse is to grab the nearest child’s corpse, while still warm, and begin waving it like a flag for your little interest group to rally around, you are vermin and should not be allowed to be around decent, normal people.
In the end, you can’t escape it. You can’t NOT hear all the bul****t people are screaming about this case. The politics being pushed by various sides seem particularly vapid in this case. On the one side you have the familiar cry that that when boiled down comes to ‘MORE GUNS = LESS CRIME!’ On the other side you here the equally silly cry of ‘Guns don’t belong in civilized society!’ Let’s a take a brief look at both statements.
(Full disclosure: I actually enjoy firearms of all types, but I am not affiliated with any political party.)
The first comes from a book released years back of the same name. It is an overly simplistic phrase meant to imply a direct and constant cause/effect relationship where none directly exists.
Yes, one can point to nations like Switzerland that has very easy going firearm laws, and little violent crime. One could point to nations where firearm ownership is incredibly strict, like Sweden, that also has little violent crime. I won’t break down the entire thing, as it would take quite a bit of time to do and I’m probably boring most all of you right now anyway. The basic application of this argument in this case runs something like this: “If teachers had just been armed…” Well, yes, considering that firearms are not allowed in any form on school grounds, people were defenseless. However, this argument assumes that, laws being different, they actually WOULD have been armed.
However, this being the east coast, where firearm enthusiasm is much lower than in places like the Midwest and South, and considering even here in the Midwest with politically middle of the road teachers I’ve met, none of them have told me that they would have carried a weapon even if allowed. They just didn’t want to. I think it’s probably safe to assume that even if the laws were different, no one would likely have been carrying a weapon on that day.
On the other side, there are various statements, most of them swirling around the defunct ‘assault weapon’ ban and how we need it back, and if we had just had it in place this wouldn’t have happened. There is even more wrong with this than the first statement. First, Connecticut has its own ‘assault weapon’ ban that mirrors the old national level one, and has had it for quite some time. Second, there were no ‘assault weapons’ used in the crime (as of this evening, the closest thing mentioned has been a ‘.223 semi-auto caliber rifle’ that was left in the trunk of the car. Could this be an AR platform? Doubtful, considering the existing Connecticut law and given that, whenever possible, the media will label anything it can an ‘assault rifle’ if it think it can. It was probably the ubiquitous Ruger ‘Ranch Rifle’, which has never been on any ban list as it doesn’t match the criteria.)
This statement also buys into the fallacy that if you just manage to make something illegal, you will prevent it from happening.
But one of these sides must be correct, right? Which one is it?
The answer is that both are wrong and trying to solve a non-existent problem. To illustrate why, I point to the Chinese company Foxconn Technology Group.
(Stay with me! I promise this is going somewhere.)
I heard about Foxconn a while back. What I read seemed so ridiculous that I did a little more research to make sure it wasn’t a totally joke. It wasn’t. You see, Foxconn had a problem: Their workers kept leaving their work, going to the roof and flinging themselves to their deaths in the street below. We’re not talking once in a blue moon here. It was getting to be a regular event.
Now, if you, dear reader, or anyone else with a shred of decency in his body to find this happening at a factory you owned, you might be tempted to figure out the root cause of the problem. You might look at the fact that your company was working these people with insane hours, warehousing them like rodents, paying them very little, giving them little time away or hope for the future and thing “Hey, maybe I should change some of these conditions.” But then you wouldn’t be an executive at Foxconn, who declared, no s**t, that the company’s ‘success’ was at the root of this problem.
But these people were still jumping to their deaths into the street. Obviously, something had to be done. Well, Foxconn knew how to fix this issue: They simply installed huge, flexible nets on the sides of their factories. That way, if someone threw himself off the building, he would be caught in the net and would not make a mess in the street below. Problem Solved! At least they thought so until an enormous amount of international attention shamed them into doing something else.
Yes, I know I promised you this was going somewhere, and it is. Here it is.
When it comes to horrific things like what happened last week, both sides of the above debate are doing little more than acting like Foxconn execs arguing about how big and how stretchy the nets should be that we are going to use to totally solve this problem.
For those of you who may have missed it, what I’m saying is that neither side has the correct answer because neither side is talking about the real problem.
The question is: how is it that we, the supposedly most advanced, awesome and savvy civilization on the planet, seem to be producing more and more people perceive that the solution to their problems, real or imagined, is to murder scores of innocent people? It seems that in our culture, which it is to be noted, has done some truly awesome and spectacular things, people such as this are now becoming more and more frequent. Yes, murder and sin has always been with Americans, and in fact the world since the beginning of time, but why this type of evil and why is it apparently on the increase?
This is already getting far too long, and I apologize to the one or two of you that actually were willing to suffer through my mental wandering to make it this far. In closing, I think the seed to the real problem is to be found in our culture. Something is very wrong. There’s no legislation that is going to fix it or make it better. The culture is built and maintained by us, as in you and I. That means the real fix has to come from individuals not government or any other collective ‘them’ you want to point at. Again, that means you and I. That is incredible daunting just to even think about. Which, I guess is why it doesn’t get talked about either.
As I understand it, they have now determined (or stated, anyway) that the Bushmaster was used inside the school and a semi-auto shotgun, left in the car.
Ah, thanks for the update. I hadn’t read that yet.
You asked why, given that “murder and sin has always been with Americans, and in fact the world since the beginning of time” is it apparently on the increase?
For what it is worth, I think the decline of the nation state is at the root of the problem. Nation states embodied homogeneous cultures which enshrined in law and custom the mores of the majority ethnic group. Importantly, the culture of these nation states set up goals considered desirable. Achieving these goals required intact families with different roles for men and women.
Nation states began breaking down after the second world war because of their inherent defects with the collapse occurring after the fall of the Soviet Union. Since then, former nation states have experienced a vacuum. What do these countries stand for? How do they order their priorities? Which values trump which other values? You see these questions being debated endlessly in various ways on various central “nation state” topics: marriage, abortion, borders, homosexuality, language and so on.
In my opinion, the group that has been affected the most by this absence of socially endorsed values is young men. With fathers denied, deprived or disengaged, many young men have nobody to look to for guidance on how to be a man – a role that is not biological but must be learned. Women just don’t have what it takes for this job. Add to that, the competing voices from various self-serving groups, all trying to fill the vacuum with their own ideologies and maxims and you can see why any message that delivers “answers” is going to have a disproportionate effect, particularly on those struggling to develop an adult mind.
As the saying goes, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”. When it proves really difficult for a country to decide what to do about these really important cultural questions, it isn’t surprising that evil triumphs.
Those skilled at conflict resolution will tell you that the first step is to abandon positions and listen for the underlying issues. Frankly, I believe unless and until the mainstream media are brought under control and taught to do this, the culture wars will continue.
Apologies for the long response.
“Those skilled at conflict resolution will tell you that the first step is to abandon positions and listen for the underlying issues. Frankly, I believe unless and until the mainstream media are brought under control and taught to do this, the culture wars will continue.”
Actually, those indoctrinated to “interest based bargaining” will tell you to abandon your positions and determine the underlying interests. While determining underlying interests is a useful analytical tool, people or groups often have not accurately assessed their interests and often deny your assessment of their interests. If one does not have positions, albeit based on an accurate assessment of their own interest, one falls into the trap of resolution or agreement being the objective rather than reaching an agreement or resolution that actually meets one’s needs and conforms to one’s principles. Back in my working days it took most of my self-control to stop myself from retching whenever someone whined, “you’re just being positional.”
I’ve been through Harvard-MIT’s training on “interest based bargaining” in the collective bargaining arena and it is the sort of scheme that only professors who’ve never actually done the work could come up with, though the vocabulary is useful. Hahvud’s IBB should be called “How Management and the Union Can Work Together to Screw the Taxpayers or Shareholders.” It is basically just a charade for making it look as if there was a process of seeking management objectives when actually there is just a process of making it look like management actually did something when in fact all it was doing was giving the union what it wanted.
You sound bitter, perhaps because you hoped for better from your training. Of course, these processes can be and are used by unscrupulous and pretentious people. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t value or utility in the process. At some point, there will have to be an accommodation that takes into account what people really want as opposed to what they think they can get by posturing.
I saw from some of your other posts, that we seem to share some common ground. I’d be interested in reading what you have to say about my main points.
Actually, I expected nothing from the Harvard-MIT training except a piece of paper to hang on my wall, and it was a damned cheap-looking piece of paper. Even Republicans, sometimes especially Republicans because most know so little about how government actually works, are susceptible to being taken in by the latest trendy things from academia and the left, among which is Interest Based Bargaining. Today when everybody is drowning in the latest biz school buzzwords one is susceptible to being labelled a troglodyte if one doesn’t know the arcana. When I returned to the executive branch to try to fix the mess the Democrats had made, I inherited a staff that was a combination of very junior employees who really had no business being hired and damaged goods that really had no business being retained and I had to make something of that staff. When we restored a Republican government and I became director, I had a very junior and little known staff to put into some very controversial and high-profile situations. I just bought a little credibility for them by sending them all to Hahvud to get a pretty piece of paper to hang on their wall. Both the training and the paper were worthless but it looked good.
To your other points, I think the decline of the Western nation state and the diminishing male role in those states is a symptom of something larger. With the collapse of the USSR, Russia abandoned any pretense of idealistic communism and just adopted state capitalism, or more correctly, gangster capitalism, a system that many call fascism. The Western communists still at least facially adhere to some of the idealism while themselves “doing well by doing good” in systems that look more and more like fascism as well. The communism, the post-modernist thinking, the assortment of “isms” is very corrosive to social order and social order is breaking down throughout the West and will continue to do so until there is a complete breakdown or social order or a “strong horse” arises.
Good stuff. Saw a news program on that factory also. Same conclusions. Treat symptoms, not root causes.
Same question as yours. What great need or pain can possibly be relieved by killing anyone let alone 1st graders?
Thank you, Andrew Klavan.
We have in large measure lost the ability to raise our children, especially our male children. Having been one, I know that the only thing a young male human respects is something he knows can and will hurt him. The principal thing that historically could and would hurt a young male is an older male, usually the father but other older or larger males as well. Young males fought among themselves and hurt and were hurt by each other. They learned that violence hurt by getting violently hurt themselves.
The dominant male figure has all but disappeared in much of America today. The closest we have to dominant males is poorly socialized young males huffing and puffing and trying to be gangstas or video game heros. Parents generally will not and specifically fathers and father-figures cannot discipline children and especially cannot discipline male children in the only manner that means anything to them. The teacher and modern mommy method of talking to unsocialized boys about “finding better ways to express themselves” just produces sociopaths with a contempt for feminized authority. I don’t think either of my step-sons has much of a sense of right and wrong – too much government school and popular culture for that – but they by God have a sense of caught and uncaught, though they got it at the cost to me of having serious conflicts with my wife and more than one session with the nice lesbian social workers and the Kid Nazis from the so-called child protective services.
Art, I think you have hit the nail on the head: The feminization of American society, particularly as it affects males, is a complete failure. When I was a kid eons ago, disputes were handled with your fists. You had it out and when it was done you usually shook hands and walked away. Outlets like this are no longer available so problems like bullying fester and get fed by things like violent video games as well as our popular culture (movies & music) and go unchecked until, in some persons, the bubble bursts and the outcome is a “take as many with me as possible suicide.”
you two are on to something here
i cant quite wrap my head around it but i get glimpses of humanity actively seeking to impede natural law and, thus, fostering an environment which will resolve itself explosively rather than gradually and smoothly
The teacher and modern mommy method of talking to unsocialized boys about “finding better ways to express themselves” just produces sociopaths with a contempt for feminized authority.
Yes, the feminization has to stop, fast.
To see one direction we’re headed, try this search: sweden+students+boys+urinate+sit
…not just the girly Swedes, either. We’re talking about an idea with, er, legs.
Break out your Iron John, Mr Bly.
Hey Art Chance, how right you are. And the thing that gets so tangled up here with the soft discipline-ites is its simplicity. Were there to be a strong father in a boy’s life from the get go, most likely the boy would behave well with but a scowl or sharp word from the Dad and not require more. The boy trained up to respect the Dad regulates his behavior with a healthy measure of fear and uncertainty, no, make that certainty, about what’d happen to him if he does wrong.
So, two things:
One, the Dad exercises authority over his son without violence, but only the promise of such. The “walk softly, but carry a big stick” axiom as a way to prevent violence.
Two, the child, the boy, who chafes and rebels, as many will, begins his rebellion from very far within the realm of civilized behavior. He doesn’t already inhabit the outskirts of such because the authority figure in his life has sharply drawn for the boy what is right and what is wrong and worked to keep the child therein.
Fathering well requires so much from a man.
So Mr. Lanza is at fault for not being a strong male role model for his son?
Or is the culture at fault for conditioning Mr. Lanza to look at the same pic we saw of an obviously disturbed young man and ‘not see’ the gravity of his son’s condition.(btw he had more than enough money to send the kid to Switzerland for long term psychiatric treatment-some of the best institutions in the world)
Denial, hidden family secrets, what goes on behind closed doors in dysfunctional families is the real elephant in the room here. And from what I’ve seen working with social workers for the last 11 years and the detached, clueless, abusive, neglectful and addicted parents recommended for therapy, it’s a wonder we don’t have more of these young guys opening fire.
The proximate cause is certainly the parents. That said, gender roles and family constellations have been so distorted by popular culture, government school education, and the opinions of “social scientists,” that there is plenty of fault to go around. There are plenty of bad parents out there but there are also lots of parents that try their damnedest only to fail because they can’t withstand all the other influences on their kids. From my experience, from the moment a kid sits in front of a TV, goes to a movie, or steps inside a public school, they’re not really the parents’ kid anymore and try as you might to shield them from bad influences, either the bad influences will find the kid or the kid will find the bad influences. I have one that has an unerring sense for the shallow end of the gene pool and he’s learning that life is hard, but it is really hard when you’re stupid.
Art, I’m an educator and altogether agree and empathize with you. Our public institutions, including and, perhaps, especially, our school boards have just about everything about life and child psychology wrong, wrong, wrong. Children are not inherently good: like all of us, they start out utterly self-centred with the need to be socialized. The real God—the One referenced by Andrew—has been closeted and replaced by the ludicrous policy of “building [as in giving, for free] self-esteem”. What poppycock: self-esteem needs to be EARNED and that only happens when kids are both encouraged and expected to overcome real and substantial challenges.
As my career progressed, I was allowed less and less to challenge students—especially the more difficult ones. Tough needs tough (love): I’m good at that—not allowed anymore. And the powers that be wonder why the inmates are now running the asylum. I recently had the misfortune to be in a class with a very angry, very violent, young student: the board’s “Safety [sic] Plan”? Smooth the way for him at all times: provide no “bumps in the road”. E.g., Don’t rile him because if he doesn’t get his way, he’s prone to punch, bite, throw/smash things, kick, threaten death with scissors, etc. The mandated responses to his anxiety include: speak in a soft voice, don’t make any sudden movements, empathise with him, offer preferred activities, avoid the word “should”, etc. There is no suggestion that this student should face any meaningful challenges or consequences for his violent, exceedingly dangerous behaviour. This cockamamie plan, which rewards the atrocious behaviour, guarantees more of it, and is, in fact, a behaviour modification plan for the adults! The violent student is accountable for nothing. (This madness has teachers tearing out their hair—and retiring early.) This dangerous, unaccountable youngster’s got the whole system wrapped around his baby finger.
Are this child’s very serious pathologies being dealt with? No way. Besides the very real danger for his victims, he’s being allowed to continue his reign of terror. In fact, the board’s response is aiding and abetting it. This atrocious dereliction of due diligence is an utter scandal—and altogether typical of our public school boards and “Child Safety” agencies. I also believe this wilful blindness is a form of child abuse. Letting this child off the hook is not helping him at all: he’s as much a victim of the prevailing, progressive insanity as are the rest of us. Without the intervention this boy needs—which would obviously interfere with some of his “rights”: what about the rights of his victims?—I can imagine he’s eventually going to seriously injure or even kill someone and then end up in prison.
For rational people, the consequences needed for the scenario I’ve outlined are as clear as the nose on one’s face. However, our progressive “overlords” in most public institutions have completely abandoned common sense. Until these idiots face the mental health (sometimes it’s just behaviour) problems of pathological young people head on—which means seriously intervening with methods that may not be all “sweetness and light”—no amount of gun or other weapon control will make the slightest difference. (How about taking on Hollywood and the other, low life purveyors of guns, guts, and gore, zombies and vampires, etc.? I like John Hinderaker’s idea that there be a “violence” tax—and fine the MSM too, when they misreport such tragedies as Newtown.)
Encouraging every child to exercise his/her “rights” while being his/her own god is another really bad public education idea. The vacuum caused by the banishment of God from the public square has spawned a generation or two of “Little Emperor/esses”: what a mess, a mess that only the actual, or at least the idea of, “Love God and thy neighbour” can overcome. And that’s the truth that’s been outlawed in both society at large and our public schools. Kyrie eleison.
Every one of my stepkids, now age 30, 28, and 26, was at least once assaulted at or near school by a “mainstreamed” “special needs” kid, most of whom were ADD/ADHD types that I think is usually a BS diagnosis. Most ADD/ADHD is just a more polite way of saying BRAT. If those kids had the certain knowledge that I had that getting out of my desk and running crazily around the room or throwing a chair at a fellow student would get the living Hell beat out of me, they wouldn’t do it but once.
I went to school with mostly poor country kids, some of whom your farm animals weren’t safe with. We were a wild, violent lot – but not at school where desks were in rows and kids sat quietly in them addressing teachers as Sir and Mam. By the time we were in high school much of the year half the cars and trucks in the HS parking lot would have had one or more guns in it; nobody ever brought one into the school though. We didn’t carry those silly backpacks that you could hide God knows what in either. My stepkids never used their lockers; just carried all their stuff around in a heavy backpack all the time.
Art, we’re altogether on the same wavelength. The kids are now cotton battened, especially the worst ones. The lefty idiots think more hugs should do: Hug a Thug. Yeah, right . . .
My disdain for the bureaucrats of our educational establishments—the very ones who are charged with dealing with the aftermath of this violence—knows no bounds. These minuscule, lefty camp followers wouldn’t recognize an original idea if it smacked them in the face. These truncated human beings are generally part of the problem, not the solution.
Isahiah62 (below), same wavelength too. I’ve noticed the same thing. Actually, it dawned on me gradually. The infantilization of the “bad guy” has spread out like a ripple: first it was the kids, then their non-adult “adult” parents, then the violent rioters (G20, OWS, etc.), and now even our international enemies. The bad guys are protected everywhere, it seems, while the responsible adults trying to deal with the carnage—literally—get clobbered.
[i]Don’t rile him because if he doesn’t get his way, he’s prone to punch, bite, throw/smash things, kick, threaten death with scissors, etc. The mandated responses to his anxiety include: speak in a soft voice, don’t make any sudden movements, empathise with him, offer preferred activities, avoid the word “should”, etc. There is no suggestion that this student should face any meaningful challenges or consequences for his violent, exceedingly dangerous behaviour. This cockamamie plan, which rewards the atrocious behaviour, guarantees more of it, and is, in fact, a behaviour modification plan for the adults! The violent student is accountable for nothing. (This madness has teachers tearing out their hair—and retiring early.) This dangerous, unaccountable youngster’s got the whole system wrapped around his baby finger.
Are this child’s very serious pathologies being dealt with? No way.[/i]
As I was reading this prescription for disaster you describe so well.. I could not help thinking that we are also doing these same stupid things on a much grander scale with terrorists and enemies
Agree with most of the analysis but the conclusion doesn’t work for those of us who aren’t ‘cultural coves’ (let’s hope that was irony) walled-up in Bertie Wooster world.
How about a secular third commandment for mere mortals? “If you encounter serious violations of #1 and #2 above…lock, load, shoot straight and pray for more ammunition”.
Better to go down fighting than fading away in a fit of piety. Hell, you might even win. And how about requiring every school principal to be proficient in the use and deployment of small arms as a condition of employment? Plenty of retired cops and military around to help out, surely an improvement over the frumpy housewives of the nanny state.
And as for changes in social policy… well, let’s not go there just now.
Roger Simon has the same problem. I’m one of your fans, Andrew. But Christ talked a lot more about hell than He did heaven as warning and Christ certainly didn’t shy away from talking of Satan either.
Perhaps Paul put it best: For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
Evil most definitely has a conscious and in this current realm, it’s winning. That doesn’t excuse any of us from succumbing to it.
Are you telling me that the Gospels are more about judgement than forgiveness? Certainly both are there, but, based on many readings of all the Gospels many years ago, I’m going with the forgiveness piece for Jesus. Have you done a line count, or is it just that the judgement piece resonates more with YOU? I would have no trouble believing the latter. Paul is not Jesus.
What’s the point of forgiveness if there’s no downside to not being forgiven? Christ’s offer of absolution is the carrot; damnation the stick.
I’m telling you the Gospels are both. I’ll save the line count unless you would like to wager some real money about the entirety of the New Testament which is the only thing clowns like you understand – your money. For every one reference to heaven, you’ll find approximately two references to warnings. Too bad the truth bothers you, “Saint Dwight.”
And Paul wrote approximately 2/3 of the New Testament, was Christ’s hand picked bond servant, and certainly would know a “hell of a lot” more about Christ’s message and intent than some sanctimonious, modern day nitwit name Dwight, seeking a feel good message about love and no more.
You obviously have no clue to who Jesus really represents or what constitutes Jesus’ words which you must think start at Matthew 2 and end at Acts 2. Start at Genesis 1 and get back with me, Saint, when you hit the last verse of Revelation. Then perhaps you’ll understand fully who Christ is (maybe).
Ah, the peace which passeth all understanding seems too be elusive for you. We are not talking about heaven vs hell, but love and forgiveness vs condemnation. When Christianity did not work as well as I thought it should for me, rightly or wrongly, I withdrew. You stayed, possibly because you find it useful to smack people around with. Praise the Lord.
If you want to battle it out in the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation (just to talk like you) I have forgotten more of them than you know. Does that make me a saint?
You got me fooled, Saint Dwight – a transparent fraud. Where’s this knowledge that passes Paul’s, Saint?
You remind me of the modern day Pharisee, hearing what you want to hear, seeing what you want to see, picking and choosing but never gaining understanding. Put it to the test if you’re that good. So far, I’m unimpressed with this so called knowledge of yours. Appears to me you haven’t made it to 2nd grade Sunday School yet.
And heaven and hell is exactly what we were counting, dummy. You’ve already forgotten. Look up, read up, buck up.
But you’re right about one thing. I enjoy smacking sanctimonious frauds like you around, believing themselves wise who are simply fools.
I won’t deny that Christianity has a positive effect of at least slightly soothing the savage beast; it appeared to somewhat civilize the Vikings, but most of Jesus teachings are simply NOT followed. As the Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus in the Brothers Karamazov, “what you asked people to do is just too hard; we give them something they can actually do.” Just look at the mileage two relatively minor parts of the NT get; the Parable of the Talents and Jesus chasing the money-changers out of the Temple. Why, because that is what our human natures want to do, but 90% of Jesus teachings go the other way from the Sermon on the Mount to “if my Kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight.” OK, I will give you also, “I came not to bring peace but a sword.” Look, I don’t doubt for a second that you are a better person as a Christian, than you would be if you weren’t, but the fact that most folks fall so far short of what Jesus taught discourages me from thinking that accepting Christ is truly transformative, but then, maybe my father and I just took it all too literally and I should accept that half a loaf is better than none, especially when it comes to permitting some of you to be calm and swagger less at least a little of the time. I’m sure the Lord would love (and be impressed by) the swagger.
If you don’t hear a different voice and tone in Paul, than in Jesus, then you’re not listening, but Paul was a man and Jesus was, if you are a believer, a lot more than that. Paul had to start the messy business of turning the idealism into the religion, which eventually conquered Rome, and has yielded a long and winding road of good stuff and bad stuff. And God bless the United States of America.
If there are more scriptures you would like to discuss, or club poor old me over the head with, have at it. I’m a sinner too, for sure, but you might be at least even with me in the Pharisee competition.
Club you over the head? Why I thought you were going to school me with your profound knowledge? I’m still waiting for you to school me. {snicker} I knew you were a fraud when you were going to take the author of 2/3 of the New Testament to task for his lack of knowledge about Jesus. That’s beyond ludicrous. That’s parody posing as genius and true comic gold.
Next time you going looking to pick a fight, you ought to pick a subject you know something about where you have more than an obvious superficial knowledge…
You just make things up as you go along so the snickers, the name calling and the swaggering hint to me that YOU don’t really know your scriptures. I did not say specifically that Paul did not have knowledge of Jesus, but that he had a different tone. But now that you bring it up, would this be the Saul/Paul who never met Jesus, never heard him utter one word except for his Road to Damascus vision? Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were all supposedly walking and talking with him daily for several years. Whether they actually wrote the Gospels (and Acts) assigned to them is another question. Sure, given the way things probably worked, Paul may have lobbied for or against certain of the scriptures becoming accepted as canon. How the early apostles really interacted is a fascinating story, if unknown story, I’m sure. It undoubtedly does not suit your purposes to be introspective about how all the scriptures and Paul’s letters came to be collected, edited, reproduced and then sorted out from the various scriptures which did not make the cut. Granted, I learned what little I know of that sort of thing, considerably after the time when we went through the whole Bible several times, and the NT many times, and… I actually paid attention. It may also not suit your purpose to acknowledge that I spent the first twenty years greatly admiring these guys, especially Jesus (it was the world I knew best) and I have walked down that aisle. It would be a cop-out to say that it was people like you that caused me to walk away, but it would be at least half true. If you are a representative of the born-again, why would one want to join the community of believers? When some of my father’s parishioners turned out to be John Birchers, I picked up my marbles and exited, breaking my parents’ hearts, but it was no longer a world I could beleeeeve in.
So, when you argue that I am a fraud and have only a superficial knowledge, that’s when I know that you are blowing smoke. Name calling isn’t going to do it here. Try some substance.
I can entertain myself with imagining how you conservative righties would greet Jesus, should he actually happen to walk into one of your churches. I’m afraid that you might find his political views, or maybe even lack thereof, much too effete. You could have a conversation with him about concealed carry; I’ll bet he’s be a strong proponent, right? Peter, put up thy sword, and all that.
So you’re a man of substance, hey? {cough,cough} Okay. When in the world did I say any place I wanted you to be a part of my brethren? I have no earthly desire for a New Age Libbie amongst my flock, or to even be in your presence. You’re amongst a host of some of the most unredeemed, unedifying characters that grace this board with your Christian bigotry. So now that we have that misunderstanding clear:
Undoubtedly in your numerous walks through the Bible Saint Dwight, you were not paying much attention. Exactly which of Paul’s letters were edited again? Is this like that referenced above where you have knowledge that those 2,000 years ago who actually lived it didn’t have? Something the 1st Century Church fathers didn’t know, but you do? And I assume you have proof of this? Which letters from Paul didn’t make the cut again?
These disciples who walked and talked with Jesus for 42 months that you referenced? Did they dispute Paul’s writings or his teachings and were simply overruled? I’m afraid not you see, as Paul was treated as the Elder by the apostles and as a matter of fact Paul was held in such high esteem by Christ’s disciples, he was considered amongst their brethren the equal of Peter. Or do you know better than disciple Peter too? Paul was the very last for Christ to appear as 1 Cor. 15:7, demonstrating you may have read many, many times (which I highly doubt) but apparently missed the entire content of the power and authority of the message.
So here’s the bottom line for me, S.D..
I’m just guessing your problems with Paul are two fold: (1) You don’t understand in full; (2) those scriptures that are perfectly clear without any dispute condemn your chosen life style. It’s a pity, isn’t it?
As to the effete Jesus, where did you stop in your reading? I think somebody edited your Bible too. Apparently, you didn’t make it through the First Gospel, much less the New Testament.
Would this be the same effete Jesus that The Word says, “I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations.
Don’t know about you S.D., but that sounds a whole lot harsher than concealed carry. I think you need a remedial class or two in not just your biblical history, but your aptitude of retaining.
Mea culpa. I am a very bad “new age” person….. even if I did not hold the coats of the men who were stoning Stephen.
As for his letters, I wrote, “It undoubtedly does not suit your purposes to be introspective about how all the scriptures and Paul’s letters came to be collected, edited, reproduced and then sorted out from the various scriptures which did not make the cut.” Does that claim that any of Paul’s letters did not make the cut? Read carefully. As for the real answer, neither one of us know.
By quoting what sounds like Revelations to me as something Jesus said, is that supposed to prove something about Jesus words? Maybe the Lamb said it. Or is the whole NT, somehow the words of Jesus to you?
I won’t contest Paul’s “take a little wine for thy stomach’s sake,” (although my father certainly would) but you are right that I fear his condemnation of my lifestyle: I am not sure that he would approve of my guns or hunting. I’m sure he would love your bluster, as well.
But enough of this goofy sparring.I have a more serious question. Do you think that when Jesus talks about Caesar and government, his words also apply to our city on a hill?” I ask because the uber-patriotism of SOME Christians puzzles me in the context of the Bible. I don’t hear that in Jesus, or Paul for that matter, but I sure hear it in them. Ditto for the individualism vs socialism piece. Also, I can’t picture Jesus being rabidly against high taxes, in fact that was exactly why the Hebrew nationalists apparently hated him when he responded with his “Render unto Caesar…” to their dastardly questions. Didn’t Jesus know that he was supposed to be supporting Tea Parties I and II? From my reading, he did not care about such things. What did I miss?
You keep referring to yourself as well read of the New Testament, yet you don’t know the correct spelling of ‘The Revelation’ as in singular?
Fortunately, that dreaded Paul makes clear our place with respect to government’s role in Romans 13 – which I suppose you’ll have to discount since Paul wrote it. A real shame because Paul would take an adversary like me to task of my low opinion of your beloved and inane Barack Obama, who I neither respect nor love, but disdain and have no use.
One thing I can certainly tell of you Dwight. I have no idea your intent, but your knowledge of exactly how the entire Bible was constructed and developed is transparently null and void.
Undoubtedly, you are unaware whether you believe in the truth of the New Testament or not, it is far and away the most accurately provable of all documents from antiquity, with 6,000 copies of manuscripts or pieces of manuscripts that can be traced from 1st and 2nd century that by themselves could reconstruct 97% of the entire New Testament – written by 2nd generation Church fathers in three different languages.
I have no idea what Christ would have thought the appropriate tax structure but I am absolutely sure Christ would have thought charitable giving a matter of the personal heart – not government’s role to divvy up the funds like a commune to curry favor and buy an election.
One thing for sure – if we as a country were to follow the message of the New Testament, there’s many a lib that would be going hungry at this moment; Obamaphones not accepted.
Yeah, I was well-read in it fifty years ago, but I also acknowledged having forgotten a lot. I recall identiying in Sunday School verses as Revelations 4:12, let’s say, but memory is a tricky thing. Hell, I was a good, but not brilliant student, whose knowledge of the Bible helped me a lot in many college courses and in teaching, and also leading to a past fascination with Jung as sort of a half-way house between belief and unbelief. “Lord, I believe, help Thou mine unbelief.”
I give a fair amount to charity including some Christian organizations I recall from my youth like World Vision, but I also have an eye on the fact that it is a tax deduction. What do you think of the fact that tithing, gets one a hefty tax deduction? I still have the idea of tithing in the back of my mind as a way to live, but I certainly do not give ten percent (unless you count the guvment, which tithes for all of us.
There is no question that the Scriptures are an amazing collection of documents and the history of Christianity is also amazing, even if one chooses to see it as a human, rather than a divine phenomenon. Many critics take it as a given, which they can then tear apart, (there’s no shortage of bad stuff to be attacked) and the attitude of many “believers” spurs them on, but it is still amazing, and the King James Version has a tone, which transcends all others that I have heard. I am actually offended when I hear lines I know from the KJV repeated in a more modern fashion, but that’s just me. In a very secular school, I taught larger or smaller pieces of the Bible, in one form or another for my whole career, probably not in a way that you would like, but it did expose kids, Christian, Jewish, and whatever else to an amazing cultural document. One also had to be as wise as a serpent, and harmless as a dove to pull that off, AND eventually get other teachers to do a Bible unit. You have to sell it as a cultural document, as, or more essential to our literature as Greek mythology.
As for Obama, you must be pleased at how religious he is starting to sound.
” If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink: For thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head, and the LORD shall reward thee.” One of my favorites.
So you get an infection and go to your local vet to get better. She gives you levaquin, a common and strong antiobiotic, rather than a z pack. But levaquin has odd **mental** side effects. Panic attacks for example. Doesn’t happen to everyone, just a few. Levaquin isn’t like prozac and intended for the unhinged to be normal or the depressed; it’s a mere antibiotic.
Mutiply odd side effects of the modern pharmacopiae. Millions (most of us!) taking drugs of all sorts; the weirder side effects are still there. People are affected. Some of these will be *really* affected. Look at teen suicides and too many of these happen when said teen is being treated for acne. The ancients ignorantly cowered before their wrathful gods during lightning storms. Klavan here imitates. I say it makes more sense that we have a closer look at the acne med. Drugs are a better explanation than the supernatural.
From Ellen “PJ” Barkin, who while mocking the talking snake, is trying its damnedest to convince us we evolved naturally from the crawling snake…
ah the snake!! – prior to Abraham and Judaism- were the snake worshiping cults- people who did child sacrifice to appease their serpent . Thisis why we see the serpent representing EVIL in the Adam & Eve story
“Whether or not the devil exists, the world behaves exactly as if he does.”
Well, when two thirds of the world’s population are Christians, Jews and Muslims, that’ll happen. Other religions have a similar conceptual icon comparable to the devil. or to evil. So, whether the devil or evil are real or not, the meme will, of course, bleed over into popular culture and society. That’s a given.
The reasoning is questionable. It’s as if you said that authoritarian political regimes must be a good thing, because most of the govenments in the world are authoritarian.
But, ‘whether real or not, most of the world’s poplution believes in the devil and in evil because of their own reglous beliefs’ is a more accurate statement.
The faces of those beautiful children staring out from the newspaper box stopped me in my tracks. I can’t stop thinking of the absolute hell that their parents are going through right now. May G0d have mercy on them.
Didn’t watch either, In fact my first response was dread that if I turned my tv on it would be all I would see and hear for a week. It would be what it turned out to be, a push to ban guns. We know why it happened, the details we didn’t know, but we knew, and we really don’t need to hear about it for a week like the world stopped. This all should be local, I’m sick of government agenda being pushed and pushed and helped by Hollywood who creates the crap and pushes the so called gov solutions, sick of it. They want to get rid of God everywhere and shove it down our throats that we are the enemy if we believe, well, this is what you will get and it will get worse. It is up to individuals, it’s what is in our hearts, each and everyone of us, it can be God or nothing, we have a choice, I CHOOSE GOD.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…
Absent God’s deliverance from sin, man cannot ever hope to keep this commandment. Cf w/ Psalm 51: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.”
Man’s inclination is to transgress God’s law code. The end result is alienation from God and death. Man must initially be made new, then continually renewed in covenant with God and neighbor.
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me…that I may teach transgressors your ways.”
Man’s heart, soul and mind must be reclaimed if he is to love his neighbor.
Murder is a heinous crime, but it is primarily a sin–a violation of God’s law.
“Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight,..”
He who sins against God destroys himself and his neighbor. The Law of God protects innocent life; the fruit of antinomianism is mass murder.
Are you ready for a little flashback? You will enjoy this enlightening and true video our stories growing up!
Published on Oct 26, 2012 If you were a child of the 50′s,60′s,70′s or early 80′s this is a salute to you. “I can’t believe we made it!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyAGE8Y7ojc&list=UU9heF2E_SD1B3VNepCVYS9w&index=5
I don’t think Satan is a spiritual being running around “out there” someplace. Satan lives in/on us – he is a parasite. He gets transmitted from one mind to another. You can catch Satan like a disease. The more of us he inhabits, the stronger he gets. I think that without us keeping him alive, there would be no Satan.
Unfortunately, most of us are already infected. A lot of us know it and we have various ways of fighting off the disease. (A church is a bit like a sanitarium.) Some of us don’t know it, or don’t care, and are given over to the disease and its main symptom – evil.
Two instructions seem appropriate here: the Golden Rule (Do unto others…ect.) and “He who is without sin may cast the first stone”.
I noticed Feinstein, Shumer, and Durbin were gathering rocks as fast as they could for some time early next year. Obama, with Valerie’s permission, no doubt, has decided to join their ‘side’.
People who had nothing whatsoever to do with this tragedy are about to have a hail of rocks raining down upon them very soon. Innocent gun owners will be pelted by furious masses out to seek revenge for something which they bear no responsibility.
Is this civilized, or have we abandoned that too?
No, it’s not ‘civilized.’
We’re living in a police state, or what is sometimes referred to as a security state. All such security states (tyrannies) need an internal ‘enemy of the people.
The right has been chosen to play the part on ‘enemy of the people.’
Once you understand that, the rest of what the left is doing starts to make sense.
I’m going to be charitable and say a lot of the people calling for more/less gun control aren’t doing so to push a political agenda as much as falling into the only too human trap of wanting to do something. They believe there is something we can do to prevent this in the future. As others have said, our society wants to deny the existance of evil. By doing so that leaves a void which people look at and try to fill with what they think causes such a thing. While there are practical steps we can take, we need to debate them with clear heads removed from such heartrending tragedy.
As far as people BLAMING guns/culture/etc. I don’t believe the hyperbole that people spout about the degeneration of humanity. It may be true that we have more of these horrific occurances than we did a decade ago, but my math background is strong enough to know that nature has a tendency to go up and down, not due to changes in environement but simply because average is not normal. I don’t rule out the possibility, but show me the statistics, not your gut feeling because it’s amazing how often perception is wrong.
Ultimately I try to put things like this in a historic perspective. Think of the activities that were “entertainment” not too long ago: such as public hanging, or throwing rotton food at people in stocks. Think of war before bombs, when entire armies would descend on villages as children were slaughtered with blades and women were raped, before or after being killed. Regardless of sex or age all were vulnerable to being enslaved, beaten, tortured. Or perhaps the savagery was mostly saved for the animals as crops were burned and the people were simply left to starve.
We also forget how hard life was on a regular basis. I don’t think video games are any more desensitizing to suffering than watching half your siblings and peers die, losing a loved female to childbirth, or hacking off a limb or two in some local scuffle or feud. In fact I might be persuaded that such fantasy can serve as a healthy release of aggression for otherwise well adjusted people.
I believe that for humans charity and compassion are learned skills. Religion, both the lessons of it and the promise of a higher reward, are a large part of what civilizes us. I don’t restrict that to Christianity, but simply to any religion that believes in absolute morals and ultimate punishment/reward. Intellectuals may want to convince us there is no God, but it is actually in their self interest to convince us that there IS, even if they don’t believe in one themselves, simply because society is better and happier when people believe.
But always remember: Barbary was the reality for most people through history (and still is for some). We have the priviledge of living in a sensitive society where we can navel gaze. Rightfully so in a case like this, but we need to keep perspective. We are only a handful of generations removed from the savagery of our ancestors. And those that seek to change the status quo thinking that we’ve grown beyond such behavior do so at their own peril.
MC, well said! Thanks.
You write, “We are only a handful of generations removed from the savagery of our ancestors.” I concur, but just a small quibble: we’re a lot closer than that. Think “Lord of the Flies”. As belief in a loving, but stern, God dwindles, so does altruism—no mystery there—and civility declines as well.
We’re heading down that slippery slope at a dizzying speed! And the pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia (culture of death), anything-goes progressives make believe they’re sitting on some sunny plateau. What fools!
True. It’s the illusion of control. Major illusion.
Put it this way: If a human being wakes up one morning and decides that TODAY is the day the big massacre will take place, nobody on earth can do anything to stop him. Because nobody knows FOR SURE what he’s going to do until he starts pulling the trigger.
A kid whose alcoholic parents beat him up every night before bedtime and who likes target shooting might never harm anyone. A kid whose parents know he’s got “problems” and who send him to therapy and don’t allow guns in the house might be the one who goes postal. What’s the difference? Nobody knows – not you or me or Dr. Helen or the news media or the politicians. Lots of theories, lots of generalities, but ultimately, nobody knows why that silicone chip inside someone’s head gets switched to overload.
Maybe it’s a quantum thing…
Apparently God lacks the power to “deliver us from sin” absent human beings believing in this Power and petitioning it again and again and again…
And for all we know, the killer thought he was doing the Lord’s work too.
By the way, NRA gun nuts have no problem with the fact that automatic machine guns are banned, what is the difference between automatic and semi-automatic? I agree non-mentally ill, non-criminal citizens out to have access to non-automatic weapons. Don’t understand why anyone needs a semiautomatic.
Markus: “Apparently God lacks the power to ‘deliver us from sin’ absent human beings believing in this Power and petitioning it again and again and again…”
WHAT are you talking about? As you’re obviously a product of our progressive society—your ignorance of Christianity seems to prove that—it’s no wonder that you’re woefully ignorant of God’s covenant with us poor, weak, human creatures, whom He, in His goodness, created. Christians don’t pray for God to “deliver us from sin”: it’s “evil” that we ask to be delivered from. How does that happen? Christians ask God to give us the discernment to know what is right and wrong—his Word is a pretty good guide—and we ask for the grace to do the good. This doesn’t mean, however, that we won’t ever do the bad—sin—or have anything bad happen to us. What it does mean is that we know God will be with us—Emanuel—no matter what.
God has graced human beings with free will: He can’t, nor does He want to, force us to do anything. He is what He is: yes, humans are his co-creators and many are His help-mates. However, whether we agree to join in His plan for salvation, or not, His power is unchanging, in saecula saeculorum.
I don’t want you to “understand.” I ask you and your kind to leave me alone. I do not want to give up my liberty just to make the ignorant, like you feel better about themselves. Progressives always feel better about themselves when they are restricting the freedom of others. One of the tenets of moral relativism.
Much as I admire your articles usually, this time I disagree profoundly. Your formula for being good is impossible, therefore a recipe for hypocrisy and despair. An impossible “ideal” is a reliable fast breeder of criminality.
Umm. Guns are tools. I expect most of my neighbors have guns. I’ve been proven right. We only have crime on our street until the miscreant runs into a neighbor with a shotgun.
The most adamant gun-control fanatic I’ve met beat his wife and children into the hospital, repeatedly. He also had weapons training, and used them at his job. He didn’t bring the gun home, ever. He worried about “impulsive people.” He had no idea that his wife, and his children, a boy and a girl, had had to decide whether to harm him, or not harm him, and trust that God would honor his promises- no-kill, honor your parents- and God would be their protector. They are all grown up, and mature, while he is still convinced that he’s correct. He has no idea how much prayer they took, step by step, to not reach for a gun to protect themselves.
I don’t believe in the state, or social workers, or the government, can protect any helpless anyone. I believe policemen can control the chaos a little bit, after the fact.
This young man was jealous. That cannot be legislated against, or rooted out. He picked Cain’s side in the dispute. That’s, what, chapter 2, 3 or 4 in Genesis?
Are they going to have a service of mourning for the children? What time to we pray with the families?
Responding to the earlier Abortion thread. I am old enough to remember the days before Row v. Wade, when abortion was illegal in every state. Was it then considered murder in any state? No, it was not. Was it ever considered murder at any time, in any place in the world? I challenge all concerned to come up with an example more recent than the Middle Ages. The ‘abortion-is-murder’ belief is, in fact, relatively new and arrived along with the rest of the Conservative party line. To repeat: in the 1950′s NO ONE called abortion murder.
Oh, and for those who still say, “well, it is”–my guess is that many of you also favor capital punishment. So, then, shall we execute the doctors AND the mothers involved in every abortion? And what about your cherished States’ Rights? What will you do about states that refuse to make abortion a capital offense?
I thought this place was supposed to have some standards. How does this Cynical Wonder get his/her stuff published. All he does is defame and insult people he does not agree with.
Honestly, I came into this thread reading some of the replies and my own response went out the window because it was all so damned distracting. UGH. Right out of the Commie Bastid playbook too.
There is perhaps some weirdness going on here. Caller to Limbaugh this morning supposed that the perp may have been saving the kindergartners from the destruction of everything when the Mayan calendar rolls over on 12/21. His mother was a committed survivalist, so he was well exposed to the doomster world view regardless of mental state.
We travel this road for a minute bit of time and we open the door for the left to do to the right what Stalin et all did to Mother Russia – define your political opponents as mentally ill and institutionalize them. Given that there are no longer any guardrails on what the left says and does, that door may be opened far sooner than any of us want. Cheers -
Marxist totalitarians want total control and power. That’s all gun control is about.
The ‘DEVIL’ is in the details…
Perhaps it is this simple to understand this human hatred in the air: We are the rotten fruit of the Cold war. In war there is shared sacrifice and great austerity to unite the people . The Cold war for the very first time we faced thermal nuclear war and the extinction of the human race as a valid prediction
What to do? Pleasure yourself and now 30 million babies in the Mama’s womb have been murdered in USA to keep up our shared pleasures but this is hard to hear because it makes us no different than Hitler , Stalin or Mao who mass murdered under pressures while we mass murdered for the type of pleasure that demand we practice amnesia and it only get worse when we begin to mass murder out of pressures we are not use to as our pleasures are taken away
Face it…NO law will ever stop crime. That is fact!
But, a bullet will. True story.
JanineC,
Can you imagine an outcome where the teacher had a loaded weapon and was able to take down the assailant?
Delia– Yes I can imagine the outcome— Head line— Former teacher now in jail for gunning down troubled former student.
When our President Obama was there the rabbi sing prayer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS–_V9Sq-Y
and child latter ( Jason Graves ) sing Islam prayer
one comment :”Strangely, as a Christian I found Jason Graves and Jewish Rabbi move me to tears.”
This not the face of the enemy. This is the face of an untreated mental illness. We can all saddle up our gun control or gun freedom hobby horses. But what this is some body that needed a doctor. Pills can make a giant difference for a crazy person. I have met more than a few in my life. Its easy to criticise or look down on a kid with a broken head but its not practical.
O American women,
What good is thy freedom living in Satans cages?
Hath not Troya suffered great Mycenes rages?
They who have fashioned thee, a nation of savages
Not in one swoop shall mighty Troya fall, but in many steps and stages
Thus Troya crumbles and falls again, with no help from the sages
A great curse upon thy nation, sendth her to history’s pages
Two eyes of a woman and one crazy horse, sendth a great nation, to the poets pages
The end is near and the end of thy wages
What hath you to do now, but wait for thy prophets messages
And with Ilion’s chant and drumbeats of doom, herald in thy dark ages
“I avoided watching television this weekend. I didn’t think I’d be able to stand the stock phrases, the helpless tears, or the journalists losing track of themselves in order to grab useless interviews with traumatized 8 year olds.”
Me neither. I’m fed up with the media’s feasting on episodes like Sandy Hook. I sympathize with the relatives of the dead, but this is not a national tragedy. It wasn’t even a regional tragedy. Yet the media will make it so with their ghoulish obsession with unhealthy grief-mongering. It isn’t lost on me that especially if the event involved guns the media is grinding down the opposition to ruthless gun control.
@Cynical Wonder
“The analogy you are attempting to make is a false one. No one is talking about taking away anyone’s guns.”
The hell they aren’t! This is what happens EVERY TIME something like this happens. Every single time something like this happens, here come you liberals with the same talk of “let’s have a reasonable discussion about gun control”. You’re not fooling anyone.
It’s as predictable as the sunrise. Columbine: guns. Aurora, Colorado: guns. Virginia Tech: guns. Tuscon: guns. In every single one of these cases, the answer from the left has been, we need more gun control. And that’s it. Never evil, never personal responsibility, never the lack of moral values or a conscience. Nope, the answer is gun control, end of story. That’s all we hear.
We have gun control. We get more and more gun control every time something like this happens, and yet it keeps happening. Why? Because guns aren’t the problem. The problem is easy to understand: Murderers are evil. Period. (This may come as a shock, I know.) But answer me this: Would the kind of person evil or sick enough to murder 20 children, not be that kind of person if guns weren’t around? Do you really believe that?
Can you describe a gun law that would have prevented what happened? Or any of the other mass killings in recent years?
GUN EXPERT LOTT: LET TEACHERS CARRY ARMS, BAN GUN-FREE ZONES TO HALT MASS SHOOTINGS. Whenever you see more than a few murders taking place, the odds are almost a hundred percent that they are going to occur at a place where permit-concealed handguns are banned. And they were doing it, ironically, in an attempt to try and make people … READ MORE: http://bwcentral.org/2012/12/gun-expert-lott-let-teachers-carry-arms-ban-gun-free-zones-to-halt-mass-shootings/
National Review had a great Morning Jolt column on this on Monday. He covered the CopyCat effect, too much publicity egging on these nuts, also, that multi-bullet clips could be regulated somehow?
And, yes, don’t the media ghouls realize what credps they are, USING these children?
My religion, Judaism, locates evil not in an external agent but in the human heart. We were created with an inclination to do evil (the yetzer hara) and an inclination to do good (the yetzer hatov) and the free will to choose between them.
When I read the piece of scripture Klavan quoted I didn’t realize he was quoting from Matthew because the first part of it, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” is from the first paragraph of the Shema, the central Jewish declaration of faith, and the 2nd part, “Love your neighbor as yourself”is from Leviticus 19. (I never realized Jesus was such a good Jew. Christians, go ahead and say “duh.”)
Having digested what to me is a stunning realization that totally changes my perception of Christianity, I can now go back to Klavan’s last two paragraphs feelings energized, inspired, & having no idea what to do or think next.
Linda, Jesus was, indeed, a most observant Jew. Here’s the story of him teaching in the temple at the age of 12 (Luke 2: 39-52, RSV Bible):
And when they had performed everything according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own city, Nazareth.
And the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.
Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the Passover.
And when he was twelve years old, they went up according to custom;
and when the feast was ended, as they were returning, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents did not know it,
but supposing him to be in the company they went a day’s journey, and they sought him among their kinsfolk and acquaintances;
and when they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem, seeking him.
After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions;
and all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.
And when they saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.”
And he said to them, “How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
And they did not understand the saying which he spoke to them.
And he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart.
And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man.
There’s a nice picture of this here: http://bibleillustration.blogspot.ca/2008/08/jesus-in-temple.html
I’m an observant Christian and am sorry that your idea of Christianity and Christians has, apparently, been pretty negative. I’m glad you’ve changed your mind.
Shalom and may G_d bless you this holy season.