Let’s make no mistake: Secular Progressive Leftism is in charge and has been for decades. Look at every institution that makes up a culture. From the classroom, the writer’s room and the newsroom to the board room and the committee rooms of Congress, where Christianity was ejected, Secularism has infected. Isn’t it time for a reckoning of how they’ve done with their power?
Let’s make no mistake: Secular Progressive Leftism is in charge and has been for decades. Look at every institution that makes up a culture. From the classroom, the writer’s room and the newsroom to the board room and the committee rooms of Congress, where Christianity was ejected, Secularism has infected. Isn’t it time for a reckoning of how they’ve done with their power?
I have been letting my thoughts crystalize. Profound sadness overtakes any other reaction when children die senselessly. That profound sadness is only compounded by a mass killing in Buffalo earlier this month and another at a Brooklyn subway station last month. We could probably recount each violent episode and others, almost month by month, going back years.
I wish others would also give the thoughts and feelings time to coalesce. Instead, some percentage of the country has an unhelpful and unhealthy reflex to bow up and prepare for rhetorical battle.
One set of people are ready and quick to remind everyone that humans perpetrate violence, not guns, and that the only realistic preventative measure to violence is to arm and prepare more people to respond.
Another set of people are as ready and quick to inform you that your sympathies, thoughts, and prayers are meaningless, that unless you agree with them about policy, you’re a heartless monster, and that the only preventative measure is to, “do something.”
I mostly ignore people who have policy ideas within hours of terrible savagery. Now that I have had some time, I did decide to stare as honestly and as practically as I can at this question: can these acts of violence be prevented, and if so, how? What follows is my stream of consciousness on that question.
Jettison for a moment the immorality and unconstitutionality of banning guns or most guns outright. Just ask: would it prevent even most of the violence we’re seeing today? I don’t think it would.
In the US, we have more guns in circulation than we have people. We have 330 million Americans. No one knows the exact number, but the number of guns in circulation is likely just over 400 million. You could ban the manufacture and purchasing of guns tomorrow, and it would have no impact.
The illegal drug trade that runs almost unchecked in the country would just extend to guns.
Again, forget the morality and the 2nd Amendment for the moment. Is it realistic as a mature policy proposal that the federal government would confiscate, by force, those guns or at least a lot of them? Millions of guns are unregistered. Maybe thousands of Americans would resist by responding with deadly force.
That practical objection comes before absorbing the reality that it is also illegal.
I understand the lay person’s instinct toward this, but this is also no solution.
Roughly 2% of deaths where a gun was the weapon used by the killer are deaths where the gun was a rifle.
That goes before understanding how easy it is to turn many handguns into functional rifles. Further, I’m not being pedantic when I wonder: what is an “assault weapon?”. I heard one pundit use the definition, “any gun where one round is fired for each time the trigger is suppressed.” That describes very literally almost every pistol in the country.
Moreover, that same FBI chart I have linked above demonstrates that a majority of deaths caused by a person using a gun come from handguns/pistols. In the end, an “assault weapons” ban — whatever that means — might make its proponents feel good about themselves, but would result in only a marginal change in death, if any at all.
Okay, I guess, but can someone explain what violent acts we expect this to prevent? Most of the mass killers we could name over the last 15 years either did pass background checks or would have if they had submitted to one. Nothing in most of their records would have precluded them from purchasing a gun.
Moreover, this assumes that people with criminal intent would, for no logical reason, submit themselves to a background check instead of using a criminal method of getting a gun.
I know this is discouraging, but when you dig into those FBI statistics, you will find most gun violence with pistols is perpetrated by people who already circumvented the background check system and bought the gun illegally. These are often previous criminal offenders disqualified from gun ownership but don’t care.
I’ll admit my skepticism on this because many guns change hands between family members, friends, or locals making free exchanges. This also does not address the reality of hundreds of thousands of guns already in the possession of people who might not have passed a background check.
People already skirt the law in a myriad of ways. I can’t find a good reason to think bypassing a background check while selling a gun would be any different for most people. Again, I’m not calling this a bad idea. I am just dubious as to its effectiveness.
I am confident most of the anti-gun folks are honest, scared, and just want to see the bloodshed lessened. Not all of these people are power hungry authoritarians. I recognize the good intentions.
I just review the ideas and wonder how practical or helpful any of those ideas are. So what might help?
Some killers of late had been obvious risks to public safety. I’m leaning toward needing a way for a citizen to report potential risk to a law enforcement body and then let due process run its course. I have not landed on specifics, but let’s say we have three independent mental health professionals all testify that someone has become a danger to themselves or others, a judge could order any guns already in possession to be removed from the home and apply that information to a background check.
I would want automatic sunsets for those orders. Maybe after a month, and each month after that, the case would need to be heard again so that liberty may be restored to the troubled person.
Whatever process would be created, it needs to value individual liberty and the right to defend one’s self and property while also allowing due process to deprive someone of liberty and property for a short time of determined danger.
I’m against almost all government spending and largesse. However, if we are going to require defenseless children, teens, teachers, and administrators to meet in a building daily with no permission to defend themselves, then we have to provide robust security. I understand we’re offering these Resource Officers, but why not more?
Whatever it costs to get hardened, armed security to our schools, let’s pay it.
Even as I work through this, I am realizing that the prevention of mass shootings is an entirely different set of policies than trying to prevent violence committed with guns more broadly. Red Flag laws and hardened schools or institutions try to prevent mass shootings — a relatively small number of deaths caused by someone using a gun.
If we’re going to affect change against violence committed with guns more broadly, that will require fundamental changes in law and in culture.
Enforce existing gun laws. We already have a ton of gun laws. Let’s enforce them and make the punishments for breaking those laws severe.
Reintroduce some form of mental health committals. Our “insane asylum” system decades ago was inhumane. However, the idea isn’t outright bad. Many of our violent offenders do not need to be in prisons, but through due process, need to be committed to a mental health facility.
Invest in more mental health resources. The presiding worldview of the past 50 years has been secularism. Secularism has led our people to its logical terminus: hedonism that turns into existential nihilism. It’s no wonder we’re largely mentally ill.
Value Virtue — Correlations does not prove causation. It is nevertheless worth recognizing the correlation between the disintegration of families and the rise of depression, anxiety and other emotional disorders. Broken families create broken people. Broken people are most likely to do violence.
I know it’s from Yoda (from Star Wars), but we can find a ton of wisdom in one of his most iconic lines:
Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to the Dark Side [or to “suffering” in another quote].
We live in a hateful time. I have called it a “Cold Civil War” for almost a decade now. Some significant portion of the American people are at war with each other (a civil war). Thanks be to God, it has, thus far, been a cold war. We haven’t started hurting each other yet.
That cold war warmed up a little in the last 12 months. From violence in Milwaukee, Kenosha, Portland and other American cities last summer to the siege of the US Capitol this week, this cold war threatens to get hot.
My interest is in easing the tensions and finding a way forward. So, in this moment of real hatred for each other, what can we do? I suggest reverse engineering Yoda’s wisdom.
We are hateful because we are angry, and we are angry because we are afraid.
The hatred we see acted out in the streets and online emanates from the reality that people are afraid of each other. We’re terrified of what happens if “those people” get the power of the government.
For my ideological compatriots, we fear losing the country we love. We see the United States as set of ideas that has led to the greatest national force for human flourishing in human history. We see forces and ideas antithetical to the ideas that has led to so much freedom and prosperity. We see those forces growing, and we fear.
I wonder if I could help you have less fear as the party of the Left dawns nominal control of the levers of the federal government.
Friends, it was only about a decade ago (January 2009-January 2011) that the following was true:
Barack Obama, a truly anti-American radical, was president.
Democrats had 60 (SIXTY!!!) seats in the Senate.
Nancy Pelosi had a few-dozen seat majority.
Remember what they got out of that dominant time? It was the Affordable Care Act. Of course, they spent insane amounts of money and enacted other regulations/policies that slowed the economic recovery. The seminal “achievement", though, was Obamacare.
Obamacare was indeed terrible. It was a fiscal monstrosity, an affront to human freedom, and has broken almost all of its promises. But that’s all they got, folks.
You made it through the time most friendly to radical Lefitsm we had ever seen (I hope ever see), and we came out with a lot of the Constitution and human liberty intact.
A doddering older man who ran (falsely) as a moderate is about to be president.
It’s a 50-50 split in the Senate.
Nancy Pelosi has one of the smallest majorities in the history of Congress (9 seats).
That set-up for the next two years will not be fun, but listen to me: it’s going to be fine. The stuff we rightfully fear (being rid of the filibuster, packing the courts, adding States, real, by-the-book-defiinition socialism) is not getting through that governmental set-up. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat, has already made that clear. Other vulnerable Democrats in the Senate will be wary of those items as well because all of these people exist only to be re-elected.
The real MVP of the United States are our founding fathers. They installed a system of governance that makes truly radical ideas almost impossible without really broad consensus.
So, friends, I know there is fear. I know that fear feeds the anger and the hate. It’s happening to a lot of Americans on all sides. Here is my call to you: you do not have reason to fear. We’re not at the end of our Republic. We must be vigilant for human freedom right now, but we’re not at the end.
Don’t be afraid. Life is long, and we have plenty of reasons to believe we can maintain and build even better a world to leave to our progeny.
Peace and love,
Cory Truax
