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.