A Conservative View

The Culture War - Part 2

There has been a rash of school shootings that has been in the news recently. Some people want to blame the inanimate firearm as the cause. Some want to blame the lack of mental health facilities. Some want to blame the government response. A few want to blame the person who actually pulled the trigger. Many people, for political reasons, want to blame someone or something before they obtain all the facts, and the discovering the facts takes time.

I’m not interested in arguing about firearms. Nor am I interested in arguing about statistics and how people are conveniently selecting the data they want to talk about to support their positions. It would be easy to throw out sound bites for any argument I wanted to make. I could point out that the AR rifles have been produced for over sixty years and issues with them have only occurred in the last ten. I could list everything we protect with firearms and point out what we don’t protect, until there is an “ongoing incident”. But this wouldn’t address the root cause(s). To do that, we must look back in recent history.

Probable causes are a disdain for the sanctity of life, the desire for sex free of commitment, the desire for power and the desire to never feel guilty about what you do and believe. These are all interwoven, so a history lesson is in order.

Back in the late 1800’s, the seeds for what we see were being sown. Charles Darwin wrote his Origins of the Species, the start of evolutionary theory. I could argue that evolution is faith and not science but that is perhaps another article. The important derivative precept was that God was not necessary for life to exist. Building on this were philosophers like Nietzsche, Freud, Kant, and Jung. Karl Marx found life unfair and prepose that since there was no God, the people had to make their own equality. Adolph Hitler went further and preposed that some were superior to others and should be the ones in control and the inferiors should be eliminated. For without God, life has limited value if it has any at all. These are broad brush strokes, but they based what they believed on a philosophy that there is no God, unlike the scientists before them.

Back in the 1950’s, sex outside of marriage was frowned on socially. In the 1960’s the quicky marriage was invented, rapidly followed by the quickie “No Fault Divorce”. This often led to single mothers. Compassionate people wanted to help but it was such a big problem that “only the government could address it”. So, the government stepped in, but only as long as she wasn’t married. And then to be compassionate to the woman, wouldn’t it be nice if she didn’t have to have that child to drain her financially? So here comes abortion. Margret Sanger, the creator of Planned Parenthood and a noted eugenics supporter, supported it toeliminate “the black race”.

By now, fractured families had become more socially normal. As society moved further away from God, those in power in government realized that if they could keep the “commoners” divided, they could remain in power. Thus, divisive philosophies became the norm. Media, which at one time just presented the facts and let you decide what to believe about it now tells you what to believe without giving you all the facts or in some cases any of the facts. But maybe that’s another rabbit hole to go down some day.

Our children are now taught that whatever they believe is true. They are taught that if it feels good do it. They are taught that they are entitled to whatever they wish. They are taught that if they complain long enough and loud enough that they can get their way. They are taught to disrespect authority. Is it any wonder they don’t value other people’s life? Sometimes they don’t even value their own.

Granted, I’ve painted this issue with a broad brush. But it is generally accurate. I was once told that life is a precious thing that should be highly valued but in the correct circumstances that life wasn’t worth a plugged nickel. If people continue to believe their own relative truth and reject objective, absolute truth, nothing will change. Prepare to see man’s inhumanity to man grow to an epic scale.Firearms aren’t the problem. Man’s fallen nature and unbridled appetites are.

If we have a right to life, as the Declaration of Independence states, then we have a right to have the means to defend it … including firearms.